Marooned in Realtime

This story presents a powerful and original vision of the future, and dramatizes the experiences of people living through it. The aspects of it that depend on bobble technology are unlikely, because bobble technology is implausible—but fascinating, because so much can be done with it. The other aspects of this future are more plausible and may well come about sometime.

In particular, Vinge used this book to talk about his idea of the Singularity: the idea that ever-accelerating technological changes will at some point turn humanity into something transcendental and unimaginable. Because it's unimaginable, he can't show it to us; instead, he shows what leads up to it, quite persuasively.

I give the book five stars because I'm impressed by the vivid vision of the future. There's also a murder mystery that runs through it, which is OK, but unlikely to impress connoisseurs of murder mysteries. The extracts from Marta's diary are quite interesting in a way, but they ramble on somewhat without advancing the plot much, and I tend to skim over them when rereading the book.

The characters of this story are varied, and competently drawn, but their behaviour is sometimes implausible. At one point we're told that Della Lu is 9000 years old, thanks to future medical technology, but it's impossible to portray someone of that age convincingly; and the hint of a romantic relationship between her and the 50-year-old Wil Brierson seems rather preposterous. Juan Chanson's life history, when we discover what it was, seems implausible in a different way.