Marooned in Realtime

Marooned in Realtime
Marooned in Realtime  
MaroonedInRealtime(1stEd).jpg
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author(s) Vernor Vinge
Cover artist Thomas Kidd
Country United States
Language English
Series Across Real Time
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher Bluejay Books/
St. Martin's Press
Publication date September 1986
Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages 270 pp
ISBN 0-312-94295-8
OCLC Number 13920425
Preceded by "The Ungoverned", (1985)

Marooned in Realtime is a 1986 murder mystery and time-travel science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge, about a small, time-displaced group of people who may be the only survivors of a technological singularity or alien invasion. It is the sequel to The Peace War (1984) and "The Ungoverned" (1985). Both novels and the novella were collected in Across Realtime.

Marooned in Realtime won the Prometheus Award in 1987 and was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel[1] that same year.

Contents

Plot summary

In the story, a device exists which can create a "bobble", a spherical stasis field in which time stands still, allowing one-way time travel into the future. These frictionless, perfectly reflective spheres are also used as weapons, as shields against other weapons, for storage, for space travel (combined with nuclear pulse propulsion), and other purposes.

People whose bobbles open up after a certain date in the 23rd century find the Earth completely devoid of human life. All living humans have disappeared, with only ambiguous archaeological clues for the reasons, and only those who were inside bobbles during the event survive into the future. The "low-techs" — those who were bobbled soon after the original invention of bobbles — have roughly late-20th-century technology. The "high-techs" — those who were bobbled later in time (in the period of accelerating technological progress leading up to the singularity) — have vastly superior technology, including cybernetic enhancements, faster and thought-controlled bobblers, personal automaton extensions of self, space ships, medical technology to allow practical immortality (barring accidents or fatal injuries), and individual arsenals comparable to entire countries of the 20th century. Indeed, those who were bobbled at slightly different times leading up to the singularity, have vastly different technology levels.

The protagonist is Wil Brierson, a detective who also was the protagonist of the preceding novella "The Ungoverned". Some time after the events in "The Ungoverned", Brierson was forcibly bobbled 10,000 years into the future to prevent his testimony in a case, effectively murdering him. As a punishment, the law enforcement of his time period bobbled criminals for a slightly longer amount of time than their victims, with a message explaining the crime and allowing future law enforcement to provide more specific punishment (or revenge), after the true fate of the victim can be determined. However, in this unpopulated world, every human is valuable, and the high-techs give the criminals new false identities to protect them and welcome them into their small society.

The group of several hundred people seeks to gather up all the humans left in order to gain enough genetic diversity to create a new civilization and their own singularity. They travel into the future so that they can recruit colonies of people, ending approximately 50 million years ahead in order to gather one of the largest groups trapped inside one of the earliest but longest-lived bobbles.

Before one of their very long transits, the computers of one of the high-tech project leaders, Marta Korolev, are hacked, and she is excluded from the automated bobbling. Left stranded in normal time, with her bobbling capability blocked, she dies alone after a natural lifespan on a deserted Earth. When the "murder" is discovered, the low-tech Brierson is hired by the surviving project leader, Yelén Korolev (who is also Marta's widow) to find the killer, who has to be one of the high techs.

Della Lu, a high tech who was an agent of the Peace Authority during The Peace War, agrees to assist Brierson with the technical aspects of the case. In the millions of years since the singularity, Della had spent 9,000 years alone in real time, exploring the galaxy. She discovered that intelligent life is profoundly rare, and there were parallel vanishings in the few civilizations she found, but no definitive proof of the cause. The singularity is implied to be an explanation for the Fermi Paradox. To complicate matters, as a high tech, Della Lu is also a suspect, and the vast amount of time she has spent alone in deep space and in real time leaves questions about whether she is still human. Furthermore, Yelén Korolev herself is a suspect.

The novel thus deals with the investigation of two parallel locked room mysteries: the murder of Marta Korelev, and the "locked planet" mystery of the disappearance of the human race. Brierson interviews each of the high-tech suspects, seeking evidence of any motive for murder while discussing their views on how the human race vanished. While some suggest that an alien invasion, ecological collapse, or other disaster was the culprit, by the end it is strongly suggested that this event was a technological singularity, and that the human race had transcended to a different form of existence with the assistance of exponentially improving technology.

Publication

  • Originally serialized in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, May–August 1986.
  • Vernor Vinge (1986). Marooned In Realtime. St. Martin's Press/Bluejay Books. ISBN 0-312-94295-8. 
  • Vernor Vinge (1991). Across Realtime. Baen. ISBN 0-671-72098-8.  — combined publication with The Peace War and "The Ungoverned".

Trivia

  • The author of this book, Vernor Vinge, once cited the earlier, non-fiction book After Man: A Zoology of the Future by Dougal Dixon as a very important inspiration for him, which helped him greatly to write this book.

References

External links


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать реферат

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Vernor Vinge — Infobox Writer name = Vernor Vinge imagesize = 250px caption = Vernor Vinge, at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference (CFP) 2006 birthdate = Birth date and age|1944|10|2 birthplace = Waukesha, Wisconsin, U.S.A. deathdate = deathplace =… …   Wikipedia

  • The Ungoverned — infobox Book | name = The Ungoverned title orig = translator = image caption = author = Vernor Vinge illustrator = cover artist = country = United States language = English series = Across Real Time genre = Science fiction novella publisher =… …   Wikipedia

  • Stars and planetary systems in fiction — The planetary systems of stars other than the Sun and the Solar System are a staple element in much science fiction. Contents 1 Overview 1.1 The brightest stars …   Wikipedia

  • Виндж, Вернор — В Википедии есть статьи о других людях с такой фамилией, см. Виндж. Вернор Виндж Vernor Vinge …   Википедия

  • The Peace War — infobox Book | name = The Peace War title orig = translator = image caption = Cover of first edition (hardcover) author = Vernor Vinge illustrator = cover artist = country = United States language = English series = Across Real Time genre =… …   Wikipedia

  • Anarcho-capitalism — Part of the Politics series on Anarchism …   Wikipedia

  • Prometheus Award — The Prometheus Award is an award for libertarian science fiction novels given out annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society, which also publishes a quarterly journal, Prometheus . The award was founded in 1979 by L. Neil Smith, but was not… …   Wikipedia

  • Science fiction — (abbreviated SF or sci fi with varying punctuation and capitalization) is a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science or technology. Science fiction is found in books, art, television, films, games …   Wikipedia

  • Technological singularity — The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence. [Harvtxt|Singularity Institute for Artificial… …   Wikipedia

  • List of fictional universes — This is a list of fictional universes, organized by genre and by sub genre. The term universe can be misleading, since some of them are supposed to occur in our own world, but in a fictional future (sci fi) or past (Hyborian Age) timeline.… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”