This was a fun sequel to The Peace War which does a better job with character development and has a fun murder mystery to solve 500 million years after the first book. Similar to The Forever War, this book asks a lot of readers to imagine humans traveling thousands or even millions of years into the future. Where Haldeman chose stargates as his time-traveling devices, Vinge uses the great idea of bobbles: stasis spheres that hold anything inside them for predictable amounts of time during which ...

This one hit the sweet spot for me. An imaginative tale of desperate missions of individual lives colliding with the compelling need to work collaboratively to save the human race, all placed in the frame on an unusual murder mystery. Vinge had already used the concept of stasis fields, called bobbles, as a one-way time machine to the future to good effect in his “The Peace War”. The plot there involved a government, the Peace Federation, taking over by bobbling up armies, nukes, government head...

I clicked on 3 stars for the rating, but it deserves a bit more than that.The book has interesting portrayals of how different groups of people might perceive and choose to exist in a far future.I had a number of reservations about it. First, I read it as part of Across Realtime (an omnibus of The Peace War, The Ungoverned and Marooned In Realtime). Each of the works in omnibus had some threads connecting them to the other, but I didn't think they made a cohesive unit. Rightly or wrongly, I was ...

This was a fantastic little book. Curious - i was taken in by a little glitch in the system because in our library catalog, the book has a pub date of 2006, which i completely believed, all through the book. Actually, it was written in 1986, prior to many of the most significant developments of the internet age. Yet Vinge's predictions as to the development of technology over the course of time seemed right on track. Part of the history of the story involves a war that took place in 1997 - a fac...

Very slightly better than the first

Full review on my podcast, SFBRP episode #364.

Storyline: 3/5Characters: 2/5Writing Style: 3/5World: 3/5This is a book that starts with surprises. Surprise one was that it didn't do what sequels normally do: follow up on the foreshadowed crises of the last book. What it did instead was rather fun. Vinge gave consideration to the repercussions of the technological introductions he made in the first book. One can generally criticize authors for plotholes and overlooking details when they introduce technology; it is difficult to see the unexpec...

2019 reread. This 1986 novel holds up really well, almost 35 years on. Jo Walton's is the review to read: https://www.tor.com/2009/08/07/vernor...Back already? OK, what she said. The Singularity stuff: the idea that it might actually happen in RL is less popular now, but as an sfnal plot device, it's brilliant. And Vinge sets his fictional singularity in the early 23rd century, far enough off that, who knows? The bobbles, spherical stasis-fields that stop time inside them for a preset length (if...

Sharing a fair similarity in style and content to Asimov's classic Robots of Dawn, a far future human colony requires a famous detective to investigate the murder of one of their founders and is loosely partnered with a nine thousand year old partner. It meanders a bit but has a lot of interesting world descriptions, the characters are not exactly rounded but the protagonist is at least interesting. Vinge merges the golden age mystery with far future science fiction very well but I found myself ...

Only three hundred humans left on earth. A murder mystery across fifty million years. A meditation on deep time and evolution, on civilization and intelligence.

What more could you want?

A very good book.