Ако бях прочел тази книга преди 25 години, вероятно щях да се впечатля много повече.Сега я намерих доста овехтяла, а нишката на повествованието и самите главни герои са успешно убити от дребнотемието, допуснато в нея от автора. Случило се е нещо безпрецедентно, а той ни занимава напоително с нежеланието на стар ерген да се ожени. И така, страница след страница…Иначе започна обещаващо - научен експеримент за получаването на бозона на Хигс в ЦЕРН води до неочакван резултат. Всичките седем милиарда...

I don't know why I have postponed so long to read another of Robert J. Sawyer's works. I very much liked The Terminal Experiment , and this one kept me glued to the pages from the beginning to the very end.It's year 2009; at CERN is conducted an experiment which is supposed to demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson. Not only the experiment fails, but the collateral result is totally unexpected: all humans experience a blackout for about 2 minutes, time in which they had visions of thems...

A challenging thought experiment!Like Schrödinger's Cat, FLASHFORWARD is a confounding, challenging, magnificent thought experiment that is, at once, breathtakingly simply and yet staggering in its possible scope and ramifications.Lloyd Simcoe and Theo Procopides (a pair of brilliant Canadian particle physicists ... hip, hip hooray!) are hot on the trail of the elusive Higgs Boson and the Nobel Prize that would almost certainly follow in the wake of success. To say that their experimental set up...

“There were, of course, cries of outrage in the press—editorials about scientists messing with things humans were not meant to know about.”Ah! Where would we be if scientists don’t mess about, but who is to say what are the things humans were not meant to know? Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein implies that Victor Frankenstein messed with things humans were not meant to know about, and broken necks ensue. Flashforward takes the opposing view that scientists need to experiment (mess about) for the sake...

This is a very hard book to rate. The TV show was SO much better. I was drawn to read this because I loved the TV show Flashforward of a couple of years ago, the one that didn’t make it past two seasons. I thought it was such a fascinating premise: Everyone on earth blacks out for two minutes and sees a vision of his or her own future. They get to observe exactly what they’ll be doing six months hence, leading afterward to much contemplation by characters (and viewers) about whether the future i...

Two minutes and seventeen seconds. A small amount of time for most of us, but within the confines of Robert Sawyer's fantastic science fiction novel FLASHFORWARD, 2:17 becomes more than a number; it becomes the insight to what the future holds. You see, 2:17 is the amount of time humnaity checked-out. All seven billion. As you can guess, choas ensued if you were one of the unlucky ones awake at the time. Planes crashed. Cars drove themselves. I can only guess what that unlucky skydiver experienc...

Wow, what to say.As much as I hate to say it, this book was written really poorly. Sawyer managed to claw defeat from the jaws of victory of a plot that could practically write itself: an examination of just what would happen if humanity, collectively, got a glimpse of their future.His (copious) asides were completely distracting, sharing with the reader such salient things as: all VCRs across Europe say "REW" for their rewind function, despite their national language; a tedious conversation abo...

Book vs TV series: review (mostly) written in 2010The only thing this shares with the TV series of the same name is the concept of everyone in the world simultaneously blacking out for two minutes, during which they have a “flashforward” of their future. In the TV series that is 6 months hence; in the book it is just over 21 years hence, so the implications are very different. (However, the second series, which was never made, was going to have a 20-year jump.)ConceptIt’s a fantastic premise and...

There are so many ways I could pay tribute to this book (audiobook), which was an awful piece of writing, but an entertaining way to spend ten hours in a car.Perhaps a drinking game (NOT in the car):RULE: Drink every time a character is identified by his or her hair color.*RULE:Drink every time someone uses the word "indeed" in an internal monologue.RULE: Drink every time someone answers their own question within an internal monologue a la "Yes? Yes!" or "No? No!"RULE: Drink every time a charact...

For me, Robert J. Sawyer novels are either hit or miss. They're either incredibly brilliant and I can't turn the pages fast enough ("Rollback") or I can't wait for the final page to turn just to be done with the novel ("Homonids"). And I'll admit I picked up this one because ABC has put it on the fast-track for development for a potential TV series. One that could air after "Lost" and is being sold as a "companion" piece for one of my favorite TV shows.Being a book-snob, I knew I had to try the ...