What do you think?
Rate this book
Timescape
The author of Tides of Light offers his Nebula Award-winning SF classic—a combination of hard science, bold speculation, and human drama. In the year 1998, a group of scientists works desperately to communicate with the scientists of 1962, warning of an ecological disaster that will destroy the oceans in the future—if it is not averted in the past.
499 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
274 people are currently reading
8569 people want to read
About the author
Gregory Benford
575 books599 followersGregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.
As a science fiction author, Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). This series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient mechanical life.
As a science fiction author, Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). This series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient mechanical life.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 475 reviews
August 8, 2011
The Coolness—
• This book won the Nebula in 1980! Pretty cool for it and the author, Gregory Benford. It would have been nice for Hilary Foister to share in the credit, though, considering she supposedly co-wrote this with Benford.
• It deals with tachyons! (once in a while)
• It works well as a mild sedative.
The Meh!-ness—
• There are some cool bits of forward thinking in this book, although none of them are truly prophetic, and they needed to be if they were going to be better than average. Benford and Foister project some terrorism in New York (which is a bit like a Sci-Fi writer suggesting that someday the Boston Red Sox would once again win the World Series), some ecological disaster, some biological disaster, some poverty and some hunger. Wow! That's bravely walking the plank, isn't it?
• This book receives much praise for its “strong” characterization, but I’ve always felt that strong characterization requires more than just time spent with the characters; it also requires a thorough understanding of at least one character’s depths and shallows. We need to get inside a character and really experience the meat of him/her. Not so here. We meet quite a few characters, mostly men, spending a lot of time with Ian Peterson (a womanizing English “gentleman”), John Renfrew (a whiny physicist from England of the nineties), and Gordon Bernstein (a whiny physicist from the US of the sixties), but I never felt like I knew any of them well, nor did I want to get to know them any better. If this really is the strongest aspect of Timescape, it is a fine example of why this book deserves no accolades.
The Crapness—
• There is no way in hell this book deserved the Nebula award in 1980 or any other time. How it beat books like Joan D Vinge’s The Snow Queen or Walter Tevis’ Mockingbird I will never understand. This book was barely Sci-Fi, and I think I would have appreciated it far more if the clever little time messaging business had been taken out completely. A novel about Scientific competition in the sixties would have been good enough for me, and it was the story Benford and Foister were telling anyway, and I wouldn't have spent the bulk of the novel hoping for the Sci-Fi elements that never came.
• Sadly, the cool bits of forward thinking were matched by some clangers. The authors imagined a late-20th century world where all the movie theatres were closing down out of disinterest, a world where photographic film was strictly rationed and no digital cameras were invented to pick up the slack (which wouldn’t have been a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the tachyon messenger was sending what amounted to digital images), a world where a woman being a housewife was expected by everyone everywhere, which leads me too ....
• The portrayal of women in this book annoyed me constantly. It wasn’t that Benford (not to mention his ghostly partner because he didn’t, after all) was misogynistic. I didn’t sense any hatred of women in his writing. What was clearly present, however, was the cloistered attitude of an academic in a field that – in the Eighties – kept women firmly out of its ranks. It is the writing of a man out of touch with the changing social conventions of his day, which translated into an inability to foresee the way social conventions would be formed seventeen years later. Benford’s downfall is a lazy acceptance of patriarchy and a lack of imagination for past, present, and future gender roles.
• The authors’ sickening defence of those three unassailable pillars of benevolence: England, the USA and the educated middle class. Puke, puke, puke.
• Racism towards the whole of South America, with special attention given to Brazil and Argentina. The bulk of the ecological blame falls to Brazil for their destruction of the rainforests, but there is no mention, anywhere in the book, of the worldwide market forces that must motivate such destruction.
• Page 413-414 of my copy – which I received as a bookmooch – are missing. It looks like someone took an Xacto knife to the page, and I am dying to know why and what the hell I am missing. If any of you have a copy of this book, I would appreciate a photocopy of the pages so I can read them and add them to my copy. I suppose it’s not a big deal, though, since the book was far from impressive.
• Finally ... JFK survives! And there was definitely only one shooter. Whew.
• This book won the Nebula in 1980! Pretty cool for it and the author, Gregory Benford. It would have been nice for Hilary Foister to share in the credit, though, considering she supposedly co-wrote this with Benford.
• It deals with tachyons! (once in a while)
• It works well as a mild sedative.
The Meh!-ness—
• There are some cool bits of forward thinking in this book, although none of them are truly prophetic, and they needed to be if they were going to be better than average. Benford and Foister project some terrorism in New York (which is a bit like a Sci-Fi writer suggesting that someday the Boston Red Sox would once again win the World Series), some ecological disaster, some biological disaster, some poverty and some hunger. Wow! That's bravely walking the plank, isn't it?
• This book receives much praise for its “strong” characterization, but I’ve always felt that strong characterization requires more than just time spent with the characters; it also requires a thorough understanding of at least one character’s depths and shallows. We need to get inside a character and really experience the meat of him/her. Not so here. We meet quite a few characters, mostly men, spending a lot of time with Ian Peterson (a womanizing English “gentleman”), John Renfrew (a whiny physicist from England of the nineties), and Gordon Bernstein (a whiny physicist from the US of the sixties), but I never felt like I knew any of them well, nor did I want to get to know them any better. If this really is the strongest aspect of Timescape, it is a fine example of why this book deserves no accolades.
The Crapness—
• There is no way in hell this book deserved the Nebula award in 1980 or any other time. How it beat books like Joan D Vinge’s The Snow Queen or Walter Tevis’ Mockingbird I will never understand. This book was barely Sci-Fi, and I think I would have appreciated it far more if the clever little time messaging business had been taken out completely. A novel about Scientific competition in the sixties would have been good enough for me, and it was the story Benford and Foister were telling anyway, and I wouldn't have spent the bulk of the novel hoping for the Sci-Fi elements that never came.
• Sadly, the cool bits of forward thinking were matched by some clangers. The authors imagined a late-20th century world where all the movie theatres were closing down out of disinterest, a world where photographic film was strictly rationed and no digital cameras were invented to pick up the slack (which wouldn’t have been a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the tachyon messenger was sending what amounted to digital images), a world where a woman being a housewife was expected by everyone everywhere, which leads me too ....
• The portrayal of women in this book annoyed me constantly. It wasn’t that Benford (not to mention his ghostly partner because he didn’t, after all) was misogynistic. I didn’t sense any hatred of women in his writing. What was clearly present, however, was the cloistered attitude of an academic in a field that – in the Eighties – kept women firmly out of its ranks. It is the writing of a man out of touch with the changing social conventions of his day, which translated into an inability to foresee the way social conventions would be formed seventeen years later. Benford’s downfall is a lazy acceptance of patriarchy and a lack of imagination for past, present, and future gender roles.
• The authors’ sickening defence of those three unassailable pillars of benevolence: England, the USA and the educated middle class. Puke, puke, puke.
• Racism towards the whole of South America, with special attention given to Brazil and Argentina. The bulk of the ecological blame falls to Brazil for their destruction of the rainforests, but there is no mention, anywhere in the book, of the worldwide market forces that must motivate such destruction.
• Page 413-414 of my copy – which I received as a bookmooch – are missing. It looks like someone took an Xacto knife to the page, and I am dying to know why and what the hell I am missing. If any of you have a copy of this book, I would appreciate a photocopy of the pages so I can read them and add them to my copy. I suppose it’s not a big deal, though, since the book was far from impressive.
• Finally ... JFK survives! And there was definitely only one shooter. Whew.
October 1, 2019
ENGLISH
Time travel novel with parallels to current, environmental problems.
Treats elements like grandfather paradox and other time travel issues, especially the theoretical fundamentals.
Introduces some original ideas into the time travel scheme.
Realistic Hard Science Fiction, as the author is an astrophysicist. For Space Opera fans, however, unsuitable because far too specific.
GERMAN
Zeitreiseroman mit aktuellen, umweltpolitischen Parallelen
Behandelt Elemente wie Großvaterparadoxon und andere Probleme mit Zeitreisen.
Führt einige originelle Ideen in das Zeitreiseschema ein.
Realistische Hard Science Fiction, da der Autor Astrophysiker ist. Für Space Opera Fans hingegen ungeeignet, weil zu spezifisch.
Time travel novel with parallels to current, environmental problems.
Treats elements like grandfather paradox and other time travel issues, especially the theoretical fundamentals.
Introduces some original ideas into the time travel scheme.
Realistic Hard Science Fiction, as the author is an astrophysicist. For Space Opera fans, however, unsuitable because far too specific.
GERMAN
Zeitreiseroman mit aktuellen, umweltpolitischen Parallelen
Behandelt Elemente wie Großvaterparadoxon und andere Probleme mit Zeitreisen.
Führt einige originelle Ideen in das Zeitreiseschema ein.
Realistische Hard Science Fiction, da der Autor Astrophysiker ist. Für Space Opera Fans hingegen ungeeignet, weil zu spezifisch.
June 26, 2020
Peter enters the room, greeted by Bob Slydell and Bob Porter.
Bob: Well, Peter, it seems you’ve been missing a lot of work lately.
Peter: I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing work, Bob!
All laugh
Bob: Peter, we just want to get an idea about what you do here at Initech. Bur first, we wanted to talk about Timescape, the 1980 Nebula Award winner from author Gregory Benford.
Peter: Ah, hey, that’s a great book, I really enjoyed reading it.
Bob: We did too! I mean, for a science heavy, hard SF book, it had great characterization, you don’t see that too much.
Peter: Exactly, and very well written, great use of simile and metaphor, Benford has a great command of the language.
Bob: I think that is what drew me in initially, I mean, I thought I was reading this time travel book, but it’s like Flowers for Algernon or Connie Willis’ Bellwether in that it’s also a book about science.
Peter: Great point, Bob! I liked all the behind the scenes academic drama involved in the candidate Cooper trying to get his doctorate. And really, this is not at all about time travel, so much as it is about tachyons and time communication.
Bob: Exactly, and Benford using two timelines, one in the sixties and another in an alternate 1998, with serious environmental issues made this a winner.
Peter: I can see why it won those awards Bob, and Bob.
Bob: OK, great, so Peter, what do you actually … DO here? Walk us through a day.
Bob: Well, Peter, it seems you’ve been missing a lot of work lately.
Peter: I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing work, Bob!
All laugh
Bob: Peter, we just want to get an idea about what you do here at Initech. Bur first, we wanted to talk about Timescape, the 1980 Nebula Award winner from author Gregory Benford.
Peter: Ah, hey, that’s a great book, I really enjoyed reading it.
Bob: We did too! I mean, for a science heavy, hard SF book, it had great characterization, you don’t see that too much.
Peter: Exactly, and very well written, great use of simile and metaphor, Benford has a great command of the language.
Bob: I think that is what drew me in initially, I mean, I thought I was reading this time travel book, but it’s like Flowers for Algernon or Connie Willis’ Bellwether in that it’s also a book about science.
Peter: Great point, Bob! I liked all the behind the scenes academic drama involved in the candidate Cooper trying to get his doctorate. And really, this is not at all about time travel, so much as it is about tachyons and time communication.
Bob: Exactly, and Benford using two timelines, one in the sixties and another in an alternate 1998, with serious environmental issues made this a winner.
Peter: I can see why it won those awards Bob, and Bob.
Bob: OK, great, so Peter, what do you actually … DO here? Walk us through a day.
September 5, 2017
One of the earliest Hard science fiction novel that I have read. A mind blowing for a simple reader who just thought faster than light concept was it was moving very fast. A solid gold five star book in idea side.
I have read some of author's short stories, and failed read one of his Galactic Center novel. Even with all that negative experience, I could finish read this book. The plot and storytelling is slow, as if confirmed my low expectation before reading this book. But you should read this book because the idea. That's one reason I read SF novels.
I have read some of author's short stories, and failed read one of his Galactic Center novel. Even with all that negative experience, I could finish read this book. The plot and storytelling is slow, as if confirmed my low expectation before reading this book. But you should read this book because the idea. That's one reason I read SF novels.
October 29, 2020
SF Masterworks #27 - On the face of it, a tale of two time-scapes - 1998, where a climate disaster is about to likely destroy the human food chains amongst other things; so a group of Cambridge UK based physicists think they found a way of sending a warning message back in the past ...to - 1962, in an America of Martin Luther King and JFK, a group of scientists are surprised when they start to get, what appears to be messages, turning up in one of their experiments. And if the message is somehow deciphered, won't there become a time paradox?
Reading this is 2020, this reads as a speculative fiction tale that has aged OK, but the real story is the use of Benford's own experience as a scientist for a perfect time capsule capture of what science was like for the privileged men, for women and for the scientists that tried to push the envelope in anyway. A surprisingly revealing look at the 1960s from the viewpoints of the science elite, and a not too bad story either, in both timescapes. 7.5 out of 12.
Reading this is 2020, this reads as a speculative fiction tale that has aged OK, but the real story is the use of Benford's own experience as a scientist for a perfect time capsule capture of what science was like for the privileged men, for women and for the scientists that tried to push the envelope in anyway. A surprisingly revealing look at the 1960s from the viewpoints of the science elite, and a not too bad story either, in both timescapes. 7.5 out of 12.
February 12, 2023
This was an entertaining book along the lines of Connie Willis' epic Oxford Time Series quartet. Here we are trying to get folks back in 1968 to fix the planet in 2010 (!). The book was written in 1980, so it was interesting in that he is looking forward while we are looking back, sort of like for Benford it was speculative sci-fi whereas for us it is alternative history. Anyway, the book itself is well-paced and gets deeper into university politics than, say, Doomsday Book. Without spoiling anything, I can say that it is rather more pessimistic than Willis. I enjoyed it quite a lot and can see why it won the Nebula.
July 2, 2012
It's interesting to read the mixed reviews on this book. Surprising that of those who liked it many felt it was long, dense, too much detail, too much science, or science that was hard to understand. Oddly, my recollection of reading it multiple times back when it first came out was that both the writing and plot development were remarkably elegant and spare. And that surely is one reason it won the Nebula. There was just enough science in my view, described as was fitting for the advancement of the plot since key plot lines in the future and the past revolved around understanding what was possible and what it meant. I was gripped by the desperate and uncertain efforts to communicate something to the past that might prevent the ecological disaster in the present. And, by the slow, uncertain process of discovery, efforts to interpret and understand and finally communicate its import--the slow poignant unraveling of the truth. Benford's evocations of past and future academic settings was dead-on and sobering to those of us who've worked in those environments as I was when I read the book. Characterizations were PERFECT, deeply human without a scrap of unnecessary detail. You felt equally for the people who cared and thought deeply and for those who had lost their way following their ambitions in a fatally materialistic world.
Today we face multiple potentially world-killing ecological causal chains, and have the processing ability to tease them out and predict their outcomes much more accurately and chillingly then back in 1980 when this book was first published. And that makes it particularly compelling for me now - because what might have seemed like deep cynicism about human culture and society and technology back then now seems especially prescient. I definitely want to read it again.
Today we face multiple potentially world-killing ecological causal chains, and have the processing ability to tease them out and predict their outcomes much more accurately and chillingly then back in 1980 when this book was first published. And that makes it particularly compelling for me now - because what might have seemed like deep cynicism about human culture and society and technology back then now seems especially prescient. I definitely want to read it again.
May 18, 2016
Timescape: Intimate but slow-moving story about scientists
Originally published at Fantasy Literature
Timescape (1980) has been on my TBR list for 35+ years, and I've long wanted to read the work of physicist Gregory Benford. The book won the Nebula Award, and it deals with time paradoxes, which I find fascinating but invariably unconvincing. First off, most of the book’s considerable length is devoted to a slow-moving and detailed portrait of scientists (mostly physicists, but also some biologists and astronomers) at work in the lab as well as their personal relationships with colleagues and wives/girlfriends. So to describe this as a “techno-thriller” would be inaccurate. At the same time, Benford spends a lot more time on character development than most “hard science fiction.” In the end I had mixed feeling about this book. It was interesting at times but too slow-moving to generate much excitement.
The book is set in two time periods — the first is 1962 in La Jolla, CA at UC San Diego, where physicist ordon Bernstein and his graduate assistant Albert Cooper discover mysterious interference in their experiments on spontaneous resonance relating to indium. Over time, they realize that the noise can actually be decoded using Morse code into scattered fragments of messages relating to chemical formulas and star coordinates, etc. Furthermore, they begin to suspect that these messages are coming from the future, delivered by tachyons due to their ability to travel faster than light and move backwards in time.
The second narrative takes place in 1998 at Cambridge University, where the world is suffering from various forms of ecological collapse, particularly an algae bloom that is destroying the biodiversity of the world’s oceans. Two scientists, Englishman John Renfrew and American Gregory Markham, lead a team that is urgently trying to use tachyons to send warnings back to the physicists of 1962 to head off the environmental collapse that will occur in the intervening decades.
Given the premise, you might reasonably expect the story to be a nail-biting thriller in which the scientists of the future are racing against time to send back messages sufficient to convince the scientists of 1962 that they are really from the future, not a hoax or communications from aliens, and provide enough data that these scientists of the past can mobilize the world to stave off future disaster. But instead Timescape takes its time showing us all the minutiae of the scientists‘ lives, particularly those in 1962 — their daily experimental routines, rivalries with colleagues, dissertation committees, worries about promotion to tenure track positions, exercise regimes, etc. Gordon even has to fend off his Jewish mother back in NY who doesn’t want her precious son to marry a sexually-liberated goyim girl from CA. One thing to note is that scientists’ world of 1962 is dominated by men, with the women almost exclusively playing second fiddle as wives or girlfriends. So if you are bothered by that, even though it may be an accurate portrait of the times, keep that in mind. It got on my nerves a bit.
It’s fairly obvious early on that Benford, an Emeritus Professor of Physics at UC Irvine specializing in plasma physics and astrophysics including wormholes and galactic jets, is injecting much of his own experiences as a physics graduate student at UCSD into the characters of Timescape. There’s certainly nothing wrong with drawing on your own life experiences to write a novel, since you know this world intimately. But you do have to be careful just how much to commit to paper and how to balance this with the proper pacing and not harming the plot. Personally, I thought there was way too much time spent on this part of the story, and cutting this down by 100-150 pages would have improved the pacing dramatically.
The other problem I had was the central scientific concept of using tachyons to communicate with the past. Since it involves calculating where the Earth would have been positioned in 1962 and shooting a stream of tachyons in that direction (that was my faulty understanding, at least), the message is garbled and in fragments. But strangely, the messages are focused almost exclusively on describing the environmental and ecological problems of the future, including detailed chemical formulas, rather than providing details to convince the 1962 scientists that these messages are really from the future. So much of the middle portion of the book is spent on the 1962 scientists at UCSD arguing about whether the messages are coming from secret military communications, the Russians, extra-terrestrials, etc. Why not just spell it out from the beginning and save a huge amount of time???
Though I didn’t fully understand it, apparently the future scientists were attempting to avoid spelling out exactly their identity and intentions to avoid the time paradox of having the 1962 scientists correctly understand the messages, inform the world of the danger, and take actions to prevent ecological collapse, thus negating the future in which the messages were sent from. This is a classic time travel paradox, known as the grandfather paradox, which asks what would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather — would you instantly disappear? Or is this impossible?
Instead, if they can provide just enough data to encourage the past scientists to take actions to avoid future disaster but not enough to erase the future timeline of the messages, they can avoid the paradox by creating a new alternative and better timeline. It’s enough to twist your brain into a Moebius strip, which is what time travel stories should do. But I just couldn’t really make sense of this particular idea. It comes from the many-worlds theory of quantum physics, with the idea that alternative universes are continually being created in infinite variations, and in Timescape the scientists were trying to direct this process. These ideas were explained with greater clarity in Greg Egan’s Quarantine.
I listened to the audiobook produced by Recorded Books, and they went the extra mile by using two narrators, Englishman Simon Prebble for the Cambridge scientists of 1998, and American Pete Bradbury for the UCSD scientists of 1962. It’s a nice way to distinguish between the two narrative streams, since you can immediately recognize them by the alternating accents, which is very helpful for audio readers. I thought they both did excellent work, and any failing are due to the turgid pace of the story.
Originally published at Fantasy Literature
Timescape (1980) has been on my TBR list for 35+ years, and I've long wanted to read the work of physicist Gregory Benford. The book won the Nebula Award, and it deals with time paradoxes, which I find fascinating but invariably unconvincing. First off, most of the book’s considerable length is devoted to a slow-moving and detailed portrait of scientists (mostly physicists, but also some biologists and astronomers) at work in the lab as well as their personal relationships with colleagues and wives/girlfriends. So to describe this as a “techno-thriller” would be inaccurate. At the same time, Benford spends a lot more time on character development than most “hard science fiction.” In the end I had mixed feeling about this book. It was interesting at times but too slow-moving to generate much excitement.
The book is set in two time periods — the first is 1962 in La Jolla, CA at UC San Diego, where physicist ordon Bernstein and his graduate assistant Albert Cooper discover mysterious interference in their experiments on spontaneous resonance relating to indium. Over time, they realize that the noise can actually be decoded using Morse code into scattered fragments of messages relating to chemical formulas and star coordinates, etc. Furthermore, they begin to suspect that these messages are coming from the future, delivered by tachyons due to their ability to travel faster than light and move backwards in time.
The second narrative takes place in 1998 at Cambridge University, where the world is suffering from various forms of ecological collapse, particularly an algae bloom that is destroying the biodiversity of the world’s oceans. Two scientists, Englishman John Renfrew and American Gregory Markham, lead a team that is urgently trying to use tachyons to send warnings back to the physicists of 1962 to head off the environmental collapse that will occur in the intervening decades.
Given the premise, you might reasonably expect the story to be a nail-biting thriller in which the scientists of the future are racing against time to send back messages sufficient to convince the scientists of 1962 that they are really from the future, not a hoax or communications from aliens, and provide enough data that these scientists of the past can mobilize the world to stave off future disaster. But instead Timescape takes its time showing us all the minutiae of the scientists‘ lives, particularly those in 1962 — their daily experimental routines, rivalries with colleagues, dissertation committees, worries about promotion to tenure track positions, exercise regimes, etc. Gordon even has to fend off his Jewish mother back in NY who doesn’t want her precious son to marry a sexually-liberated goyim girl from CA. One thing to note is that scientists’ world of 1962 is dominated by men, with the women almost exclusively playing second fiddle as wives or girlfriends. So if you are bothered by that, even though it may be an accurate portrait of the times, keep that in mind. It got on my nerves a bit.
It’s fairly obvious early on that Benford, an Emeritus Professor of Physics at UC Irvine specializing in plasma physics and astrophysics including wormholes and galactic jets, is injecting much of his own experiences as a physics graduate student at UCSD into the characters of Timescape. There’s certainly nothing wrong with drawing on your own life experiences to write a novel, since you know this world intimately. But you do have to be careful just how much to commit to paper and how to balance this with the proper pacing and not harming the plot. Personally, I thought there was way too much time spent on this part of the story, and cutting this down by 100-150 pages would have improved the pacing dramatically.
The other problem I had was the central scientific concept of using tachyons to communicate with the past. Since it involves calculating where the Earth would have been positioned in 1962 and shooting a stream of tachyons in that direction (that was my faulty understanding, at least), the message is garbled and in fragments. But strangely, the messages are focused almost exclusively on describing the environmental and ecological problems of the future, including detailed chemical formulas, rather than providing details to convince the 1962 scientists that these messages are really from the future. So much of the middle portion of the book is spent on the 1962 scientists at UCSD arguing about whether the messages are coming from secret military communications, the Russians, extra-terrestrials, etc. Why not just spell it out from the beginning and save a huge amount of time???
Though I didn’t fully understand it, apparently the future scientists were attempting to avoid spelling out exactly their identity and intentions to avoid the time paradox of having the 1962 scientists correctly understand the messages, inform the world of the danger, and take actions to prevent ecological collapse, thus negating the future in which the messages were sent from. This is a classic time travel paradox, known as the grandfather paradox, which asks what would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather — would you instantly disappear? Or is this impossible?
Instead, if they can provide just enough data to encourage the past scientists to take actions to avoid future disaster but not enough to erase the future timeline of the messages, they can avoid the paradox by creating a new alternative and better timeline. It’s enough to twist your brain into a Moebius strip, which is what time travel stories should do. But I just couldn’t really make sense of this particular idea. It comes from the many-worlds theory of quantum physics, with the idea that alternative universes are continually being created in infinite variations, and in Timescape the scientists were trying to direct this process. These ideas were explained with greater clarity in Greg Egan’s Quarantine.
I listened to the audiobook produced by Recorded Books, and they went the extra mile by using two narrators, Englishman Simon Prebble for the Cambridge scientists of 1998, and American Pete Bradbury for the UCSD scientists of 1962. It’s a nice way to distinguish between the two narrative streams, since you can immediately recognize them by the alternating accents, which is very helpful for audio readers. I thought they both did excellent work, and any failing are due to the turgid pace of the story.
June 17, 2017
For about the first 150 pages, I considered DNFing this novel. But it slowly picked up. While I still think the novel is too long--by at least 100 pages, due to detailed descriptions of building architecture and what characters had for dinner--I ended up giving it 3 1/2 stars. The story came together, becoming quite interesting, and by the end, was exploring the possibility/probability of a . One must remember this was written in 1980! (I wonder if it's the first novel about that subject, then?) The fact that the author is a physicist helped my rating (info given in the Afterword).
December 9, 2021
This is a hard SF novel that won Nebula Award for 1980, which I’ve read as a part of Monthly reads in Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels
As the title suggests, this book is about time travel. However, unlike the previous stories on the subject it is less interested in adventures in the past/future of time travelers (there will be none) but in actual physics, which theoretically allows sending information to the past by using tachyons (theoretically possible particles that move faster than light). There is a lot of physics discussion on why it can work and with what consequences, e.g. how to evade time paradoxes.
The novel was originally published in 1980 and two time periods are each 18 years from this date – 1962 and 1998.
In 1998 there is an environmental disaster caused by mankind and some (increasingly rarer) resources are directed to send a message to the past to prevent the calamity, while the world is falling apart. The character cast includes English physicist John Renfrew, his housewife Marjorie, assistant theoretical physicist from the USA Markham; and Peterson, a member of ‘science committee’ , a powerful international group that tries to stop the disaster by any means. They all get to tell their stories.
In 1962-3, there is one major protagonist, Gordon Bernstein, a Jewish boy from NY, who works as an assistant professor in La Jolla, California. His scientific studies are intertwined with ‘academia intrigue’, when other scientist don’t want to believe his results and his personal life with his English major girlfriend Penny.
This is a serious novel that should stimulate reader to think, not an easy read.
As the title suggests, this book is about time travel. However, unlike the previous stories on the subject it is less interested in adventures in the past/future of time travelers (there will be none) but in actual physics, which theoretically allows sending information to the past by using tachyons (theoretically possible particles that move faster than light). There is a lot of physics discussion on why it can work and with what consequences, e.g. how to evade time paradoxes.
The novel was originally published in 1980 and two time periods are each 18 years from this date – 1962 and 1998.
In 1998 there is an environmental disaster caused by mankind and some (increasingly rarer) resources are directed to send a message to the past to prevent the calamity, while the world is falling apart. The character cast includes English physicist John Renfrew, his housewife Marjorie, assistant theoretical physicist from the USA Markham; and Peterson, a member of ‘science committee’ , a powerful international group that tries to stop the disaster by any means. They all get to tell their stories.
In 1962-3, there is one major protagonist, Gordon Bernstein, a Jewish boy from NY, who works as an assistant professor in La Jolla, California. His scientific studies are intertwined with ‘academia intrigue’, when other scientist don’t want to believe his results and his personal life with his English major girlfriend Penny.
This is a serious novel that should stimulate reader to think, not an easy read.
October 7, 2016
-De lo interesante desde la perspectiva de género y pero no así desde lo estrictamente literario.-
Género. Ciencia ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. El desastre medioambiental es la principal amenaza para la humanidad en 1998. Un físico de Cambridge, John Renfrew, demuestra que es capaz de enviar un mensaje al pasado usando la ciencia y propone avisar, en lugar y forma adecuados a la única naturaleza posible del mensaje, para que pongan los medios necesarios y eviten la situación catastrófica. En 1963 y en California, el profesor Gordon Bernstein está molesto por una fuente de “ruido” no identificada en su experimento de resonancia nuclear. Su investigación sobre el origen del mismo, con la intención de continuar con su trabajo, le revelará que es mucho más que una interferencia: es un mensaje.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Ciencia ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. El desastre medioambiental es la principal amenaza para la humanidad en 1998. Un físico de Cambridge, John Renfrew, demuestra que es capaz de enviar un mensaje al pasado usando la ciencia y propone avisar, en lugar y forma adecuados a la única naturaleza posible del mensaje, para que pongan los medios necesarios y eviten la situación catastrófica. En 1963 y en California, el profesor Gordon Bernstein está molesto por una fuente de “ruido” no identificada en su experimento de resonancia nuclear. Su investigación sobre el origen del mismo, con la intención de continuar con su trabajo, le revelará que es mucho más que una interferencia: es un mensaje.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
November 6, 2008
Lots of potential but never realized. Too wordy with unintelligable technical jargon. I hated the end, though it was probably more realistic than another scenario.
This is the first and only time I ever threw a book in the garbage after reading it. I just couldn't inflict anyone I know with it.
This is the first and only time I ever threw a book in the garbage after reading it. I just couldn't inflict anyone I know with it.
November 19, 2011
Couldn't get through it... The science is interesting and clearly written, but it's just background noise to the character drama on the forefront. This novel's big problem is that it has aspirations to be something more: it wants so badly to be Real Literature (tm)... to elevate sci fi out of its genre gutter... but it only rarely reaches that level. The rest of the time is spent fumbling around in an overly wordy mix of boring interpersonal struggles.
Every so often it hits the mark. There is a brilliant chapter in which a character builds shelves in his home, an extended metaphor of applying his scientific rigor to the crooked and convoluted realities of human interactions. The timing is right on and the whole chapter is very satisfying.
On the flip side it's outweighed by incompetent segues: a highly romanticized scene in which a character accidentally stumbling in on his girlfriend using the toilet, vividly describing e.g. "the unending oval yawn" of the potty. Or there's Peterson, highly successful womanizing bureaucrat who spends most of the book trying to get every female character in bed - at one point it's revealed, almost apologetically, that the sex he's had thus far hasn't been very good... as if it's a concession to the reader or something. All told there's a lot of wading through the bland and occasionally awful just for a few bits of perfectly crafted writing (or as your interest may be: the "science" half of this SF novel). After nearly 400 pages, I had to give up.
Every so often it hits the mark. There is a brilliant chapter in which a character builds shelves in his home, an extended metaphor of applying his scientific rigor to the crooked and convoluted realities of human interactions. The timing is right on and the whole chapter is very satisfying.
On the flip side it's outweighed by incompetent segues: a highly romanticized scene in which a character accidentally stumbling in on his girlfriend using the toilet, vividly describing e.g. "the unending oval yawn" of the potty. Or there's Peterson, highly successful womanizing bureaucrat who spends most of the book trying to get every female character in bed - at one point it's revealed, almost apologetically, that the sex he's had thus far hasn't been very good... as if it's a concession to the reader or something. All told there's a lot of wading through the bland and occasionally awful just for a few bits of perfectly crafted writing (or as your interest may be: the "science" half of this SF novel). After nearly 400 pages, I had to give up.
June 25, 2020
Maybe I’ve read too many time travel books or seen too many Twilight Zone episodes, but when I read a novel that involves time travel and part of it takes place in 1962, I expect to see a message being sent saying TELL KENNEDY NOT TO GO TO DALLAS IN NOVEMBER!! Not a bunch of environmental warnings about the sea that nobody in the past can decipher. OK, so what happens does in an oblique way affect the Kennedy assassination. But I had to wade through 500 pages filled with physics and science descriptions to get to the interesting part.
I had wrong expectations going in to this book. It wasn’t really time travel, but instead time communication. But it was still way too long and way too much science for me.
I had wrong expectations going in to this book. It wasn’t really time travel, but instead time communication. But it was still way too long and way too much science for me.
September 17, 2019
This isn't a bad book, but that's not to say it is entirely a good book, either. There is a weird tension in this novel for me, anyway because what I usually find lacking in science fiction books (e.g. characters) is oversaturated here whereas what I usually find enjoyable in science fiction (e.g. utter wackiness) is here kind of boring and even dull by the standards of the characters dealing with the problems.
Spoilers! Follow beware!
The premise is clever: peeps in a dying 1998 (the book dates from 1980) use a clever use of physics to send a message back to 1963 to try and head off the environmental collapse killing off the world.
Awesome, right? I don't even care about paradoxes and all that crap, that's all addressed here in its usual weird way. Fine.
What really stands out here is the complete and utter banality with which the 1963 people approach all this. I get it, they're scientists, but at no point does anyone run down the hallway screaming, "I just got a fucking message from the future!" I found this very unsettling. In fact, the people getting the message just bury it and don't really talk about it too much. No real theories are made, they think it might be a random accident or something...it is dealt with in a very shocking way in the novel, that is, it isn't dealt with at all. You want to shake these goddamn scientists awake. Why are they more worried about their shitty relationships and tenure tracks?!?
That's my other big complaint: way too much of the novel is given over to banalities, like the scientists' personal lives in 1963, especially this creep in the 1998 storyline who is a disturbing womanizer who tries to fuck every woman in the novel. I'm all for making the characters believable and sympathetic, whatever, but not to the detriment of the story. But don't make them (in 1963) so credulous and unimpressed that weird messages they decode from the future are warning them about pesticide use creating giant plankton blooms that devour the world, that they just shrug it off and go argue with their girlfriends!!!
Spoilers! Follow beware!
The premise is clever: peeps in a dying 1998 (the book dates from 1980) use a clever use of physics to send a message back to 1963 to try and head off the environmental collapse killing off the world.
Awesome, right? I don't even care about paradoxes and all that crap, that's all addressed here in its usual weird way. Fine.
What really stands out here is the complete and utter banality with which the 1963 people approach all this. I get it, they're scientists, but at no point does anyone run down the hallway screaming, "I just got a fucking message from the future!" I found this very unsettling. In fact, the people getting the message just bury it and don't really talk about it too much. No real theories are made, they think it might be a random accident or something...it is dealt with in a very shocking way in the novel, that is, it isn't dealt with at all. You want to shake these goddamn scientists awake. Why are they more worried about their shitty relationships and tenure tracks?!?
That's my other big complaint: way too much of the novel is given over to banalities, like the scientists' personal lives in 1963, especially this creep in the 1998 storyline who is a disturbing womanizer who tries to fuck every woman in the novel. I'm all for making the characters believable and sympathetic, whatever, but not to the detriment of the story. But don't make them (in 1963) so credulous and unimpressed that weird messages they decode from the future are warning them about pesticide use creating giant plankton blooms that devour the world, that they just shrug it off and go argue with their girlfriends!!!
September 6, 2012
Timescape is both a fascinating, hard SF book about sending messages backwards through time to save the world and a dull soap opera. The premise is that the world is on the brink of total ecological disaster in 1998, because of the overuse of pesticides. Scientists have discovered how to use tachyons to send a message to the past, with a warning and pointers on how to avoid the catastrophe. The messages are received by a lone scientist in 1963.
The SF portions of the book are really well-done. There are tons of scientific explanations of the tachyons, time paradoxes, etc., which I found mostly fascinating. A bit above my head at times, but fascinating. And the inside look at academia, research, and funding was way more interesting to read than I thought it would be.
However... Much of the book is taken up with the personal lives of the scientists involved. This is where the dull soap opera comes in. For the most part, these characters just aren't leading terribly interested lives, but they're treated as though they are. The lovingly detailed scene of the 1963 scientist walking in on his girlfriend in the bathroom, for example. Most of the characters are thoroughly unlikeable on top of that, especially the womanizing Peterson.
Which brings me to the part women play in the book. They are sexual conquests, housewives, and helpers to men. There are a few female scientists, but they aren't allowed to actually do anything on the page. This is somewhat understandable in 1963, far less so in 1998. I'd even give that a bit of a pass as a product of its time, but this book was written in 1980, not 1960.
One last thing. The messages being sent back in time are meant to give scientists a head start on the pesticide problem. What they actually do is prevent the Kennedy assassination. The chain of events here is more than a little forced, and it's never actually explained why that made a difference.
The SF portions of the book are really well-done. There are tons of scientific explanations of the tachyons, time paradoxes, etc., which I found mostly fascinating. A bit above my head at times, but fascinating. And the inside look at academia, research, and funding was way more interesting to read than I thought it would be.
However... Much of the book is taken up with the personal lives of the scientists involved. This is where the dull soap opera comes in. For the most part, these characters just aren't leading terribly interested lives, but they're treated as though they are. The lovingly detailed scene of the 1963 scientist walking in on his girlfriend in the bathroom, for example. Most of the characters are thoroughly unlikeable on top of that, especially the womanizing Peterson.
Which brings me to the part women play in the book. They are sexual conquests, housewives, and helpers to men. There are a few female scientists, but they aren't allowed to actually do anything on the page. This is somewhat understandable in 1963, far less so in 1998. I'd even give that a bit of a pass as a product of its time, but this book was written in 1980, not 1960.
One last thing. The messages being sent back in time are meant to give scientists a head start on the pesticide problem. What they actually do is prevent the Kennedy assassination. The chain of events here is more than a little forced, and it's never actually explained why that made a difference.
September 3, 2019
I enjoyed this one very much. I loved the whole idea of "we" of the future (or rather 'near past' as the story is set in 1998) attempting to communicate with those of the 'more-past' (1962) to warn them of an ecological disaster that could be prevented if certain chemicals are not released into the ocean which will cause devastating algal blooms. If this were possible,could we warn those of the early 20th century not to use asbestos, or discourage the use of disposable plastics or the burning of coal and the over use of oil and such? Would they listen? We are constantly warned of the devastating effect on our climate by credible scientist for decades but we actually do very little to avert these future disasters in spite of the warnings. Add in the whole paradox thing in with it all and the lack of clarity of the message - it isn't as simple as sending a message in a bottle to the past via a time-machine, rather they send "noise" by way of tachyon particles.
I was impressed with the quality of the writing. Great character development, the back stories of both those from the "past" and "future". I liked the flip between both timelines throughout the novel. Mind you, this was not a perfect story, there were stretches and a few arguable technical flaws, but I believe that comes with the territory when it comes to scfi. Overall, I was impressed with this one.
I was impressed with the quality of the writing. Great character development, the back stories of both those from the "past" and "future". I liked the flip between both timelines throughout the novel. Mind you, this was not a perfect story, there were stretches and a few arguable technical flaws, but I believe that comes with the territory when it comes to scfi. Overall, I was impressed with this one.
August 2, 2019
Okay, this was not for me.
The good part was the idea and the scientific approach. It was apparent that the time travel ideas were founded on solid physics science of the time of the writing and not some timey wimey stuff to help the plot.
Yet the fascination of the author with the medium turned the scientific parts more or less into lectures that did not help to build an exciting or thrilling plot (which the idea of the narrative would have been wonderful for).
Most of the time the actual SF plot was interrupted by personal chapters/scenes of several male scientists, apparently all in some kind of midlife crisis and their wives, who - especially in the future parts of the book - all did housewifery things. That irked me so much, that I started skipping passages from half point on. What kind of future development of humankind is it, if a woman has problems, because her husband is never at home or cares for anything in the family and he gives her the advice to go to London and buy a new dress, whereupon she seemed to be happy again and told him he's a good man. What? Those 90ie passages (the future in this book from the early 80ies) were in no way distinguishable from the family feeling of the 60ies passages. This was not only dated, this was archaic.
The good part was the idea and the scientific approach. It was apparent that the time travel ideas were founded on solid physics science of the time of the writing and not some timey wimey stuff to help the plot.
Yet the fascination of the author with the medium turned the scientific parts more or less into lectures that did not help to build an exciting or thrilling plot (which the idea of the narrative would have been wonderful for).
Most of the time the actual SF plot was interrupted by personal chapters/scenes of several male scientists, apparently all in some kind of midlife crisis and their wives, who - especially in the future parts of the book - all did housewifery things. That irked me so much, that I started skipping passages from half point on. What kind of future development of humankind is it, if a woman has problems, because her husband is never at home or cares for anything in the family and he gives her the advice to go to London and buy a new dress, whereupon she seemed to be happy again and told him he's a good man. What? Those 90ie passages (the future in this book from the early 80ies) were in no way distinguishable from the family feeling of the 60ies passages. This was not only dated, this was archaic.
November 12, 2015
I really enjoyed the book and thought the characters were genuine, believable and also interesting, and then the book ended very suddenly ruining what had been a 5 star book, meaning it only got 4 stars.
What happened, did he have to meet a deadline and so cut it short or did he just not know how to end it. Either way I think the last 20/30 pages were rushed and spoiled what was until then a well written book, giving a genuine view of people's personalities. Shame
What happened, did he have to meet a deadline and so cut it short or did he just not know how to end it. Either way I think the last 20/30 pages were rushed and spoiled what was until then a well written book, giving a genuine view of people's personalities. Shame
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 30, 2017
Read for the 12 Awards in 12 Months Reading Challenge, the Apocalypse Now! Reading Challenge, the Hard Core Sci-fi Reading Challenge, and the SF Masterworks Reading Challenge and the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club.
Method of the world's destruction: A major failure of chemical balance in the oceans, mostly caused by an overabundance of hydrocarbons, overwhelms the ecosystem and leads to a toxic ocean bloom.
This book won the BSFA, Campbell and Nebula Awards (1981).
I am fascinated by the mixed reviews of this book! Overall the enjoyment of it seems to depend upon whether the reader understands the science behind it. I do not have a background in physics, but I do have an amateur's appreciation for the workings of astrophysics and the flow of deep time, so this might have had a bearing. And personally, I loved it!
There are two concurrent plot threads that Benford follows. Written in 1980, this book postulates a future ecological disaster, and the work of physicists attempting to use tachyons to send a message into the past, in the hopes that doing so will change the course of events. Benford also follows the flow of the physicists in the past with whom they have made contact as they attempt to understand and interpret what has happened to an otherwise simple physics experiment.
Much of the novel is concerned with the social and political workings of the scientists. The team of the future faces constant constraints in their work due to top-down limitations imposed by a council who allocate scarce resources to what they view as the "most practical" science dealing with the disaster; and this physics experiment is (perhaps rightfully) viewed as a long shot. The lead physicist in the past must contend with the resistance of his scientific community and administrators, who dislike his results and view the idea of a "message" sent from somebody with incredulity, and they make an active effort to discredit his work. I imagine it's interesting to some people to understand that scientists are themselves human, dealing with all their innate flaws and prejudices, and to realize how much of our understanding of science depends on flawed human beings doing their best.
Some critiques. First, I found it very slow to start with and hard to get into, but once I had done so and understood the nature of the drama, I was engrossed.
Second, a modern reader like myself may find the casual sexism and racism distracting, though I wouldn't call it a deal-breaker. We tend to think of 1980 as a modern time that follows women's liberation, but evidently we were not that liberated yet. As a Jewish scientist, the physicist of 1968 is viewed with unconscious distrust and suspicion that is not even explained by the author, probably because it was so ubiquitous at the time. And women are bookends to the men who are the movers and shakers of the drama. It rankles on me how the 1968's protagonist's girlfriend, who is also faculty (though in the English department) is expected to come home and make dinner for the great scientist after a hard day's work (like hers is any less hard.) And even in 1998, the other end of things, women are mostly wives who have no other purpose (there are peripheral female scientists in both times, but they are exceptions and hardly mentioned.) I think it best to view both timelines as alternate histories, with corresponding differences in culture, in order for this to be palatable, and that works well with the way the book resolves (though I won't tell you any more because that would be an awful spoiler.)
But as I said, this is still an awesome read, well worthy of its place as a SF Masterwork, and I would highly recommend it to all fans of the genre.
Method of the world's destruction: A major failure of chemical balance in the oceans, mostly caused by an overabundance of hydrocarbons, overwhelms the ecosystem and leads to a toxic ocean bloom.
This book won the BSFA, Campbell and Nebula Awards (1981).
I am fascinated by the mixed reviews of this book! Overall the enjoyment of it seems to depend upon whether the reader understands the science behind it. I do not have a background in physics, but I do have an amateur's appreciation for the workings of astrophysics and the flow of deep time, so this might have had a bearing. And personally, I loved it!
There are two concurrent plot threads that Benford follows. Written in 1980, this book postulates a future ecological disaster, and the work of physicists attempting to use tachyons to send a message into the past, in the hopes that doing so will change the course of events. Benford also follows the flow of the physicists in the past with whom they have made contact as they attempt to understand and interpret what has happened to an otherwise simple physics experiment.
Much of the novel is concerned with the social and political workings of the scientists. The team of the future faces constant constraints in their work due to top-down limitations imposed by a council who allocate scarce resources to what they view as the "most practical" science dealing with the disaster; and this physics experiment is (perhaps rightfully) viewed as a long shot. The lead physicist in the past must contend with the resistance of his scientific community and administrators, who dislike his results and view the idea of a "message" sent from somebody with incredulity, and they make an active effort to discredit his work. I imagine it's interesting to some people to understand that scientists are themselves human, dealing with all their innate flaws and prejudices, and to realize how much of our understanding of science depends on flawed human beings doing their best.
Some critiques. First, I found it very slow to start with and hard to get into, but once I had done so and understood the nature of the drama, I was engrossed.
Second, a modern reader like myself may find the casual sexism and racism distracting, though I wouldn't call it a deal-breaker. We tend to think of 1980 as a modern time that follows women's liberation, but evidently we were not that liberated yet. As a Jewish scientist, the physicist of 1968 is viewed with unconscious distrust and suspicion that is not even explained by the author, probably because it was so ubiquitous at the time. And women are bookends to the men who are the movers and shakers of the drama. It rankles on me how the 1968's protagonist's girlfriend, who is also faculty (though in the English department) is expected to come home and make dinner for the great scientist after a hard day's work (like hers is any less hard.) And even in 1998, the other end of things, women are mostly wives who have no other purpose (there are peripheral female scientists in both times, but they are exceptions and hardly mentioned.) I think it best to view both timelines as alternate histories, with corresponding differences in culture, in order for this to be palatable, and that works well with the way the book resolves (though I won't tell you any more because that would be an awful spoiler.)
But as I said, this is still an awesome read, well worthy of its place as a SF Masterwork, and I would highly recommend it to all fans of the genre.
March 19, 2016
This book has been called "hard science fiction" by some reviewers as a way to emphasize the accuracy of the author's hard science and to excuse the book's problems as a novel. I don't buy that. The word fiction still lies in the term "hard science fiction" and I'm holding this book to the standards for fiction.
By which standards this book fails miserably. The male characters are bland and wonk-y, like talking heads for the author's scientific theories. Each one has a few distinguishing quirks, but they are still the same type--lab rats. I get that they're absorbed by their work. But do I really want to hear so much about their scientific theories and their day at the lab? These scientists are not well-fleshed, distinct characters to me. They are ciphers and props and mouthpieces for the author's science. Or at least the males are. The females are considered best for something else.
Then there are the two time periods, 1963 and 1998. The then-future 1998 sure felt like 1963. I discerned little social difference between the two eras, no altered point of view or different customs for the people living in 1998. The author distinguishes 1963 from 1998 by sprinkling in pop culture references from the 1960s like confetti. (Let me guess. He did his historical research by reading old Life magazines.) But in good sci-fi writing a different world is a different social environment, extended by the imagination. This book's 1998 is a stressed-out world with advanced science, and it's circling extinction. We see, hear, or feel so little of it. It's like a stage setting in the background, rather than a richly believable world we can live in as readers.
But literary shortcomings are not this book's greatest fault. Even for 1980, the date of publication, this book presents stereotypes of women that are insidious and obnoxious. It could have been criticized as offensive then. The author parades the women like props who exist to serve and please their men. When we are introduced to these women, always through the eyes of men, they are overwhelmingly judged for their sexiness and their physical appearance. We learn they are good at cooking and good in bed. They do not appear to have opinions of their own, nor much interest in the greater world outside the home. Does any one of them have a real job?
We meet the perfect housewife (Marjorie), the pushy mother (Mrs. Bernstein), the sexed-up girlfriend (Penny), the trophy wife (Mitsuoko), the crazy old lady (Heather's mother), and the bimbo (Laura). Only one woman, the scientist Cathy, is an intellectual peer to the men and she actually works for a living. No surprise, she's described as physically unattractive (thin and bony, with papery skin), and she tells us she is bisexual. Then she plays the part of the mannish lesbian, another destructive stereotype.
How did this book win the Nebula Award? This book reminds me why science fiction is viewed as a genre, and not taken more seriously as literature. It reflects as badly on the award as it does on the author.
I borrowed this book from my public library, so I had to return it. If I had owned it, I could have had the pleasure of throwing this book in the trash. Where it belongs.
By which standards this book fails miserably. The male characters are bland and wonk-y, like talking heads for the author's scientific theories. Each one has a few distinguishing quirks, but they are still the same type--lab rats. I get that they're absorbed by their work. But do I really want to hear so much about their scientific theories and their day at the lab? These scientists are not well-fleshed, distinct characters to me. They are ciphers and props and mouthpieces for the author's science. Or at least the males are. The females are considered best for something else.
Then there are the two time periods, 1963 and 1998. The then-future 1998 sure felt like 1963. I discerned little social difference between the two eras, no altered point of view or different customs for the people living in 1998. The author distinguishes 1963 from 1998 by sprinkling in pop culture references from the 1960s like confetti. (Let me guess. He did his historical research by reading old Life magazines.) But in good sci-fi writing a different world is a different social environment, extended by the imagination. This book's 1998 is a stressed-out world with advanced science, and it's circling extinction. We see, hear, or feel so little of it. It's like a stage setting in the background, rather than a richly believable world we can live in as readers.
But literary shortcomings are not this book's greatest fault. Even for 1980, the date of publication, this book presents stereotypes of women that are insidious and obnoxious. It could have been criticized as offensive then. The author parades the women like props who exist to serve and please their men. When we are introduced to these women, always through the eyes of men, they are overwhelmingly judged for their sexiness and their physical appearance. We learn they are good at cooking and good in bed. They do not appear to have opinions of their own, nor much interest in the greater world outside the home. Does any one of them have a real job?
We meet the perfect housewife (Marjorie), the pushy mother (Mrs. Bernstein), the sexed-up girlfriend (Penny), the trophy wife (Mitsuoko), the crazy old lady (Heather's mother), and the bimbo (Laura). Only one woman, the scientist Cathy, is an intellectual peer to the men and she actually works for a living. No surprise, she's described as physically unattractive (thin and bony, with papery skin), and she tells us she is bisexual. Then she plays the part of the mannish lesbian, another destructive stereotype.
How did this book win the Nebula Award? This book reminds me why science fiction is viewed as a genre, and not taken more seriously as literature. It reflects as badly on the award as it does on the author.
I borrowed this book from my public library, so I had to return it. If I had owned it, I could have had the pleasure of throwing this book in the trash. Where it belongs.
June 24, 2025
Check out my full, spoiler free, video review HERE.
Interesting premise about a group of scientists in 1998 that contact people back in 1962 via tachyons to try and nudge humanity into avoiding an environmental and ecological disaster without creating a time paradox. The beginning and the end were pretty good, but the entire middle was a major slog. This is a character focused novel, but the characters were not that interesting to me. There is virtually no action at all in this 500 page novel and it was very difficult to keep engaged with the story.
Interesting premise about a group of scientists in 1998 that contact people back in 1962 via tachyons to try and nudge humanity into avoiding an environmental and ecological disaster without creating a time paradox. The beginning and the end were pretty good, but the entire middle was a major slog. This is a character focused novel, but the characters were not that interesting to me. There is virtually no action at all in this 500 page novel and it was very difficult to keep engaged with the story.
May 31, 2021
Slow, with annoying characters. I got highly irritated by some bits, and probably missed key explanations because I listened (distracted and bored) to the audiobook. I can see why it won a Nebula for the science, but the other 75% was a protracted snoozefest of old-fashioned stereotype-laden domestics.
January 5, 2012
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1799572...
Written in 1980, with storylines set in 1962-63 and 1998, this is a scientists' sf novel, the future 1998 world facing ecological and social catastrophe and its physicists trying to communicate with their predecessors to prevent it from happening.
As a Cambridge NatSci graduate I loved the visceral detail of the decaying 1998 setting, though Benford failed to predict one element of real life decay, the extinction of independent bookshops - he still has Bowes and Bowes open and staffed by attractive young women, when in real life I think it closed in the early 90s.
But it's a bit less satisfactory as a novel than I remembered it from my first reading. Both ends of the time line feature almost entirely male working environments, with the odd distant woman scientist collaborating but the protagonists enduring varyingly problematic sex lives with their various female partners. I was not completely convinced, though I can see that it's written from the heart.
And the sending-messages-through-time plot, the core of the book, actually doesn't work very well. Rather than the messages from 1998 inspiring scientific research to get the world out of the mess it is in, they accidentally prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and that seems to be the crucial point of departure which kicks the 1963 world out of our timeline and into a better one. Why Kennedy's survival should make the difference is not really explained. (And the elaborate system developed by the 1998 scientists to check that their message is getting through is unnecessary given that their telephone system still works.)
Though I do like the nod to Silverberg's Dying Inside, whose protagonist makes a brief appearance on page 273.
Written in 1980, with storylines set in 1962-63 and 1998, this is a scientists' sf novel, the future 1998 world facing ecological and social catastrophe and its physicists trying to communicate with their predecessors to prevent it from happening.
As a Cambridge NatSci graduate I loved the visceral detail of the decaying 1998 setting, though Benford failed to predict one element of real life decay, the extinction of independent bookshops - he still has Bowes and Bowes open and staffed by attractive young women, when in real life I think it closed in the early 90s.
But it's a bit less satisfactory as a novel than I remembered it from my first reading. Both ends of the time line feature almost entirely male working environments, with the odd distant woman scientist collaborating but the protagonists enduring varyingly problematic sex lives with their various female partners. I was not completely convinced, though I can see that it's written from the heart.
And the sending-messages-through-time plot, the core of the book, actually doesn't work very well. Rather than the messages from 1998 inspiring scientific research to get the world out of the mess it is in, they accidentally prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and that seems to be the crucial point of departure which kicks the 1963 world out of our timeline and into a better one. Why Kennedy's survival should make the difference is not really explained. (And the elaborate system developed by the 1998 scientists to check that their message is getting through is unnecessary given that their telephone system still works.)
Though I do like the nod to Silverberg's Dying Inside, whose protagonist makes a brief appearance on page 273.
September 4, 2010
This is it: good, hard science fiction. The science is so hard my head hurts. The fiction is so imaginative that separating fact from fiction requires too much thought, too. Best of all the people and place "ring true" even though you know—don't you?—that some of them can't possibly be factual. With each point of view shift the reader is taken inside the mind and the world of that character.
Benford has no trouble recreating southern California in the 60s because he lived it, but his 1998 Cambridge, UK (written in 1979) tastes just as authentic. The gloomy future is the worst of all possible worlds as projected by liberals and conservatives about the time Benford wrote. (Remember James Gallagher's England? Or Jimmy Carter, huddling in his cardigan sweater, telling the nation that the future would be cold, gloomy and small? Or Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1964)?)
Benford also captures the horror of science (and it might as well be arts) dictated by government committees interested in only in practical applications. And the tyranny of the established opinion: such as today's string theorists who will not even admit to alternative models of physical reality. Or Darwinists who shout down not only creationists but anyone questioning their orthodox beliefs.
Well worth reading.
Benford has no trouble recreating southern California in the 60s because he lived it, but his 1998 Cambridge, UK (written in 1979) tastes just as authentic. The gloomy future is the worst of all possible worlds as projected by liberals and conservatives about the time Benford wrote. (Remember James Gallagher's England? Or Jimmy Carter, huddling in his cardigan sweater, telling the nation that the future would be cold, gloomy and small? Or Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1964)?)
Benford also captures the horror of science (and it might as well be arts) dictated by government committees interested in only in practical applications. And the tyranny of the established opinion: such as today's string theorists who will not even admit to alternative models of physical reality. Or Darwinists who shout down not only creationists but anyone questioning their orthodox beliefs.
Well worth reading.
February 13, 2025
Oerdegelijke harde science fiction, waarbij 'hard' staat voor de wetenschappelijke ondertoon van het boek: in Timescape draait de plot om 'tachyon-deeltjes', hypothetische deeltjes die sneller dan het licht bewegen. Die deeltjes worden al sinds het begin van de 20ste eeuw beschreven in de wetenschappelijke literatuur en liggen mee aan de grond van de snaartheorie maar werden nog nooit fysiek vastgesteld.
Wanneer de aarde eind twintigste eeuw op een ecologische ramp afstevent (komt bekend voor?) proberen wetenschappers in allerlei onderzoeksvelden zo creatief mogelijk oplossingen te zoeken. Fysicus John Renfrew werkt aan een proefopstelling waarmee het met behulp van tachyon-deeltjes morsecodes naar wetenschappers in het verleden kan sturen om hen te waarschuwen voor het op handen zijnde onheil.
Deze premise gebruikt Gregory Benford om een breed scala onderwerpen aan te snijden: ecologische rampen en de daaruit volgende onlusten, politiek opportunisme, wetenschappelijke rivaliteit, menselijk drama, alternatieve universa theorie en de grootvaderparadox. Bovendien smeedt hij een erg sfeervol beeld van Amerika in de jaren '60.
Boeiend, verscheiden en rijk aan thema's: Timescape is een boek dat overal wel iets over zegt en dat helemaal niet slecht doet, maar echte betrokkenheid wist Benford zelden bij ons los te weken. Daarvoor zijn sommige van zijn karakters iets te karikaturaal en is een deel van het verhaal te theoretisch. Bovendien moet hij - ondanks het ruime aantal bladzijden - sommige thema's al te kort door de bocht afronden. Leuk concept, degelijk uitgewerkt en bijwijlen meeslepend met een frisse plot, maar niet geniaal. Af- noch aanrader.
Wanneer de aarde eind twintigste eeuw op een ecologische ramp afstevent (komt bekend voor?) proberen wetenschappers in allerlei onderzoeksvelden zo creatief mogelijk oplossingen te zoeken. Fysicus John Renfrew werkt aan een proefopstelling waarmee het met behulp van tachyon-deeltjes morsecodes naar wetenschappers in het verleden kan sturen om hen te waarschuwen voor het op handen zijnde onheil.
Deze premise gebruikt Gregory Benford om een breed scala onderwerpen aan te snijden: ecologische rampen en de daaruit volgende onlusten, politiek opportunisme, wetenschappelijke rivaliteit, menselijk drama, alternatieve universa theorie en de grootvaderparadox. Bovendien smeedt hij een erg sfeervol beeld van Amerika in de jaren '60.
Boeiend, verscheiden en rijk aan thema's: Timescape is een boek dat overal wel iets over zegt en dat helemaal niet slecht doet, maar echte betrokkenheid wist Benford zelden bij ons los te weken. Daarvoor zijn sommige van zijn karakters iets te karikaturaal en is een deel van het verhaal te theoretisch. Bovendien moet hij - ondanks het ruime aantal bladzijden - sommige thema's al te kort door de bocht afronden. Leuk concept, degelijk uitgewerkt en bijwijlen meeslepend met een frisse plot, maar niet geniaal. Af- noch aanrader.
June 1, 2017
In 1998, the earth is dying in an unspectacular way. I kept picturing a big, molding orange.
Desperate, some 1998 scientists figure out a way to beam messages back to some stock characters that were alive in 1963. The three main scientists in 1998 can be hard to differentiate by their dialog or behavior except one is an out-of-control sex maniac who, without furthering the plot at all, has sex with EVERY female character except his wife. I think the reader is supposed to dislike him but this compulsion of his was the only entertaining thing in the entire book.
There isn't much that is futuristic about 1998 except, comically, the characters drive by a bunch of apes doing road work. Why the overpopulated and under-employed society of the future needed to put orange vests and overalls on apes and change their DNA so they could experience the wonders of wage slavery was not explained.
The main character in 1963 is a painful stereotype of a Jewish New Yorker who was dating an annoyingly stereotyped Sun-kissed California surfer-girl. The clash of the stereotypes was examined and his stereotypical mother visits and judges his girlfriend for not reading Philip Roth and also for being a whore. The whore's ex-boyfriend shows up, gets bombed on cheap wine and starts having Vietnam flashbacks but unfortunately does not kill any of the other characters and make a necklace of their ears.
The central time mechanism that DOES drive the plot was broken.
There were a couple of cool timey-wimey moments but if it wasn't for the fact that I have to read every time travel book, I would never have stuck with this one. The author's attempts at being "literary" were very alarming to me:
It's like he has a gift for finding words that should never, ever be in the same sentence.
Desperate, some 1998 scientists figure out a way to beam messages back to some stock characters that were alive in 1963. The three main scientists in 1998 can be hard to differentiate by their dialog or behavior except one is an out-of-control sex maniac who, without furthering the plot at all, has sex with EVERY female character except his wife. I think the reader is supposed to dislike him but this compulsion of his was the only entertaining thing in the entire book.
There isn't much that is futuristic about 1998 except, comically, the characters drive by a bunch of apes doing road work. Why the overpopulated and under-employed society of the future needed to put orange vests and overalls on apes and change their DNA so they could experience the wonders of wage slavery was not explained.
The main character in 1963 is a painful stereotype of a Jewish New Yorker who was dating an annoyingly stereotyped Sun-kissed California surfer-girl. The clash of the stereotypes was examined and his stereotypical mother visits and judges his girlfriend for not reading Philip Roth and also for being a whore. The whore's ex-boyfriend shows up, gets bombed on cheap wine and starts having Vietnam flashbacks but unfortunately does not kill any of the other characters and make a necklace of their ears.
The central time mechanism that DOES drive the plot was broken.
There were a couple of cool timey-wimey moments but if it wasn't for the fact that I have to read every time travel book, I would never have stuck with this one. The author's attempts at being "literary" were very alarming to me:
familiarity with sex and the workings of those mysterious gummy organs
Between pale thighs the unending oval yawned
It's like he has a gift for finding words that should never, ever be in the same sentence.
March 28, 2016
In 1998 the world economy is failing due in large part to ecological collapse. Scientists experiment with sending a message of warning, via tachyons, to the past. The message is received by scientists in 1963 among controversy as to its authenticity. That's the science fiction part of the book, a relatively small part. The story gets bogged down in interpersonal conflicts and social vagaries in the lives of the scientists, their colleagues, department heads, and funding sources. It just goes on and on.
I almost abandoned this book about two thirds of the way through. It has entirely too much extraneous social drama. If I wanted that, I would have read a romance. In the end, though, it picks up.
Timescape explores the concept of time and the classic paradox. If only Benford had had an editor who could have nixed the soap opera. It would have been a much better science fiction book and about two hundred pages shorter.
I almost abandoned this book about two thirds of the way through. It has entirely too much extraneous social drama. If I wanted that, I would have read a romance. In the end, though, it picks up.
Timescape explores the concept of time and the classic paradox. If only Benford had had an editor who could have nixed the soap opera. It would have been a much better science fiction book and about two hundred pages shorter.
gave-up-on
March 6, 2017Εγκατέλειψα στη σελίδα 290 (από 570).
Τα κακά νέα: Απέτυχα να εκτιμήσω αυτό που εκτίμησαν πολλοί άνθρωποι: τις λεπτές πινελιές στους χαρακτήρες (έτσι λένε τουλάχιστον) και την επιστημονική ακρίβεια.
Τα καλά νέα: Επιβεβαίωσα ότι ακόμα διαβάζω βιβλία και όχι ονόματα συγγραφέων ή βραβεία (το Timescape έχει τιμηθεί με Nebula, British Science Fiction Award και John W. Campbell!). Εμένα με κούρασαν δύο πράγματα: η επιστημονική ακρίβεια, η οποία από τη μία είναι αξιοθαύμαστη, αλλά όταν μετά από 300 σελίδες ακόμα παλεύουν με τον θόρυβο στα πειράματα, ε, έχω χάσει προ πολλού το ενδιαφέρον μου, και οι χαρακτήρες που, κινούμενοι μέσα σε μία σχεδόν "πραγματική" και γι' αυτό εν μέρει ασύνδετη πλοκή, απέτυχαν να με κερδίσουν, μαζί με τις άπειρες αμερικανικές αναφορές.
Η ανάγνωση της συνέχειας της πλοκής από τη Wikipedia, μάλλον δικαίωσε την απόφασή μου. Sorry, Greg. Too little too late για τα γούστα μου.
Τα κακά νέα: Απέτυχα να εκτιμήσω αυτό που εκτίμησαν πολλοί άνθρωποι: τις λεπτές πινελιές στους χαρακτήρες (έτσι λένε τουλάχιστον) και την επιστημονική ακρίβεια.
Τα καλά νέα: Επιβεβαίωσα ότι ακόμα διαβάζω βιβλία και όχι ονόματα συγγραφέων ή βραβεία (το Timescape έχει τιμηθεί με Nebula, British Science Fiction Award και John W. Campbell!). Εμένα με κούρασαν δύο πράγματα: η επιστημονική ακρίβεια, η οποία από τη μία είναι αξιοθαύμαστη, αλλά όταν μετά από 300 σελίδες ακόμα παλεύουν με τον θόρυβο στα πειράματα, ε, έχω χάσει προ πολλού το ενδιαφέρον μου, και οι χαρακτήρες που, κινούμενοι μέσα σε μία σχεδόν "πραγματική" και γι' αυτό εν μέρει ασύνδετη πλοκή, απέτυχαν να με κερδίσουν, μαζί με τις άπειρες αμερικανικές αναφορές.
Η ανάγνωση της συνέχειας της πλοκής από τη Wikipedia, μάλλον δικαίωσε την απόφασή μου. Sorry, Greg. Too little too late για τα γούστα μου.
November 11, 2011
Books about time travel are almost all trash.
This book is a stark exception.
It is serious without being self-important.
Hard science fiction without being stuffy.
Best of all, many of the main characters are physicists, which made me happy.
This book is a stark exception.
It is serious without being self-important.
Hard science fiction without being stuffy.
Best of all, many of the main characters are physicists, which made me happy.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 475 reviews