Marooned in Realtime
by Vernor Vinge
Rating: 5.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2019-05-27
A well-paced murder mystery in a creative setting (and pretty short!)
Cool ideas in the book:
- Humans + sufficiently high tech = effective gods
- What happens at the singularity? By definition, nobody knows.
- One weird trick to experience vast stretches of time and witness geologic/cosmologic-scale developments
- What’s an acceptable cost to ensure the continuation of humankind?
Notes on second reading:
- This book and its sequel have a pretty unique time travel mechanic. You can only travel forward in time, but you’re basically unlimited in how far you can go. I also love that it explores all the different ways you can exploit the technology (e.g. “nuking out”)
- This form of time travel really plays into the fantasy I have as a fan of science and sci-fi: living to see all the things you learn about the future. Both technological advances, and large-scale processes like tectonic shifts, climate change, procession of orbits, lifecycle of stars, the death of the universe.
- This book has an interesting answer to the fermi paradox: civilizations eventually reach a singularity and transcend comprehension. It’s a play on a similar theory that civilizations eventually self annihilate.