Conference noted::sf

484.0. "Marooned in Real Time" by NULL::REDFORD (It's turtles all the way down) Tue Jun 09 1987 00:34

Vernor Vinge
Baen Books, 1987

A sequel to "The Peace War".  I've seen them bound together in 
hardcover, but this is the first release in paperback.  

In the late nineties a perfect stasis field, the bobble, is invented.
Within the bobble time comes to a complete stop.  The contents of the
bobble are thus shielded from any outside influence, even nearby
nuclear explosions.  Bobbles are indestructible, but they can be set
to pop after a certain amount of time. In "The Peace War" we saw
the fall of the Peace Authority, an  evil conspiracy of
scientists that used the bobble to destroy the nuclear arsenals of the
superpowers and take over the world. 

It's now fifty million years into the future.  Some people have used 
the bobble for one-way time travel.  They went into stasis in the 
21st or 22nd centuries, expecting to come out a hundred years later into 
a brave new world.  Instead, they found that humanity disappeared 
some time in the 23rd century.  Not a single person was left in 
real time.  A few of 
the later travelers, the ones with the most advanced technology, 
make it their mission to gather together all the survivors, even 
if they have to wait millions of years for the bobbles to pop.  
Others are not interested in re-creating humanity.  They want to 
bobble to the end of the universe and see the Big Crunch.  Or they 
want to watch evolution unfold at one kiloyear per minute.  Or they 
want to comb the galaxy looking for other intelligent races.   A 
thousand-year star voyage isn't so bad when one can wait it out in stasis.
Especially if one's space drive can be as simple as tossing a nuclear 
bomb out the back, bobbling up for the bang, and unbobbling a few 
seconds later when you're a thousand miles away.  However, someone 
has committed a grisly crime: they've marooned a person in real time.
They've cut off access to the bobbler technology and left the person 
to wander the earth alone, dying of old age while the others are 
frozen in stasis.  It's left to Inspector Wil Brierson, caught in a 
bobble by a small-time embezzler, to crack the case.

Great stuff!   One of the best examples I've seen of taking a premise 
and running with it as far as you can.  Hard sf in the Niven 
tradition.  And yet, as in Niven and Pournelle's books, my 
enjoyment was dampened by the politics tacked onto the story.
N&P's "Footfall" had some nice things in it, but every five pages 
they would go off on another rant about SDI.  This isn't nearly as 
bad, but it is drenched in libertarianism.  Brierson, for instance, 
is a police chief in a company hired by towns to keep the peace.  The 
US used to have such outfits; the Pinkertons were often called upon 
to guard factories and beat up striking workers.  Vinge is constantly 
taking pokes as "statists", and for no real story-related reason.
All of the developments that he's talking about could take place 
equally well in the H-bomb-in-every-garage anarchy that he likes or 
in a more structured society.

Another irritating belief of his is that mind-machine links will 
lead to some kind of technological beatification.  This also came up in 
"True Names", when the advanced D&D players distributed their 
consciousnesses around the entire planetary network and became as 
gods.  (This humans->gods theme seems to be playing around a lot of 
what I read.  I wish the violinists would take a break.)  Vinge 
thinks of computers as a kind of salvation, but speaking as 
someone who both works with computers and designs them, let me say 
that they're no more of a salvation than hammers.  It's pretty
hard to pound in a nail with your fist, and it's pretty hard to 
simulate a thousand transistor network in your head, but 
nail-pounding or transistor simulation doesn't make you a better person.
More capable, yes, but better, no.  If the D&D players did take over 
the planetary network, and if they stayed D&D players, we would all be 
in a lot of trouble.

That aside, let me repeat my praise for the book.  It's a good read 
and a lot of fun.  If you can ignore the 
technolatry, it's a fine piece of speculative fiction.

/jlr

    The two-in-one version is called "Across Realtime" and can be
    purchased (reasonably) by the SFBC. I guess they got a lot of
    response on this one as it appears in lots of their inserts.
    
    Anyway, this is a book well worth reading, especially if you
    like a little mystery thrown in with your sf (reminded me
    a bit of Asimov's Elijah Bailey and company but much more
    interesting).
    
    -Steve

    
    I must confess I bought "Marooned in Realtime" for the cover. I
    work in the "Realtime Engineering" group in LDP and I wanted to
    put it outside my office. Would you believe, that someone swiped
    it ? The response to the cover art was overwhelming, I guess we
    all felt we were "Marooned in Realtime". I did enjoy the book
    tho.
    
    	I am , however, getting very tired of murder mysteries.
    Asimov's robot series etc.  The technology and characters were
    very good, the premis was excellent. But seriously if you have the
    last few thousand humans in one place with all that technology,
    there must be more interesting things happening than solving a murder.
    
    Amr
    

    As a sequel to The Peace War it wasn't bad, but I'd have to say
    that while Peace War was excellent, Marooned was kind of mediocre.
    
    Willie

>    But seriously if you have the
>    last few thousand humans in one place with all that technology,
>    there must be more interesting things happening than solving a murder.

You can extrapolate the technology, but it doesn't make for a very interesting
story.  The interesting story was why and how anyone could have committed the
murder in the situation as written.
mild spoiler....

The unsatisfying part of the story was not finding out  more about the
singularity - where DID everybody go?
Bobbles I find hard to swallow as achievable, but I believe that there WILL
be a singularity event within the next 200 years.

- tom]