Timescape by Gregory Benford - book review

                       
   Timescape by Gregory Benford is a nebula-award-winning science fiction novel, written in 1979.  When it is set is important, because the novel is split between two different time periods:  1998, when the world environment is in near-collapse after the oceans start dying, and 1963.  1963 is when a message sent by the scientific team in 1998, a team of nuclear physicists, work with tachyons to send back a message in time.  They pick 1963 because scientists then are just beginning to work in the field around tachyons, without knowing they exist. The first experiments with working with nuclear resonance equipment, which allows the messages from the tachyon beams to go back to 1963 to be received - is why 1963 is picked.  Timescape is about the world as Benford foresaw in 1998, and looked back on in 1963, from his position in 1979, when he was writing it.  We, as the reader, now look back on all of it as all in the past, and so this novel should feel dated, but it doesn't.  Even though 1998 is 15 years ago now, I read it from the perspective of Benford, from 1980, and so looking ahead to one possible future of earth in 1998, and back on the past that was in 1963.

This sounds all complicated, like listening to the Doctor try to explain time business in Dr Who -
'Timeywimey"  is a word I like now and hope to see in the dictionary one day.  "A big bowl of wibbly wobbley timey wimey stuff," is  how he describes it to Sally Sparrow in the first weeping angel episode. Of course, she's writing it from the future back to him in the past in an event that hasn't happened yet either, or is happening now and that she has to send back to make sure it happens in that way so they survive.  In Timescape, the 1998 team are trying to get a message back to 1963 earth to not create - or use - a certain type of chemical that when it gets into the food chain, the molecule works as a virus and mutates within the food organisms so they become inedible. 

All this in itself is cool.  It's fascinating to watch the one team sending the message back in time, running the program, beaming it when they know the earth is in that position in the sky in 1963.  Seeing how physics, astronomy, and chemistry are all needed to solve this riddle in 1963, where Gordon Bernstein is running the nuclear resonance experiment, and picking up the coded message that sounds like intereference in his experiment.  He ends up going to chemists for the molecular code sent back, to astronomers for the latitude and longtitude delineations that he realizes gives a star in space - and a time period when the earth is there. The lives of all the scientists are explored, which gives a  human grounding to the messiness that is time travel story.  This also lets us see the inner lives of the scientists, especially Gordon, and John Renfrew from the 1998 team, who has to keep the message going back and wonders how they will know it is received, when the 1963 team can't send any message to the future. He wonders, if the world - the future - is changed by the 1963 team acting on the message received, how will they know in 1998?  How do you experience the world changing?  Will they be able to stop the diodom bloom in the oceans?  Save the environment? 

I won't give all the answers here, as how this is resolved is done in a very interesting manner.  It involves an event everyone knows, so that the reader - you and I - are involved in imagining what if this happened?  it's part of our history too.  Very interesting, and very well done. And, the future is involved too, in a very cool way.

I really liked this book. I loved seeing how the scientists work out their problems - and they really are 'head in their clouds', distant, constantly trying to work it through while going through their daily lives.  Like artists, creators,writers, they are involved in their minds working through data, especially when working through new experiments.  How does a scientist win a prize?  what does it take to be a scientist?  what's it like to run with ideas while in the midst of doing something else?  This is probably the best book on the inner workings of a scientific mind.  It's highly readable.  Trust me.  I am not a scientist, and Benford wrote the physics in such a way that I don't feel like an idiot because I don't understand, but made me feel smart because I could understand the theories behind tachyons, planets in space and time, and how a message might be sent back in time.  Brillliant, clever writing that makes the reader feel smart. 

And it might just be possible to send a message back in time.....though it is still kind of timey-wimey at it's heart, too.  Time travel is that.

Read for Carl's Sci-fi Experience, it is a really well-written, and one of the best books on how at least a message through time could  be done.  

Moving Mars - Greg Bear - Final thoughts

I loved Moving Mars.  It's a gripping science fiction novel, about the settlers on Mars, and how they grow up and break away from Earth.  It's much more than that, though. I posted earlier about my first thoughts while reading it, and I've had over a week to let it settle in my mind.  Moving Mars is about the people who settle there, and how Mars changes them. It's much like how settlers here in North America or Australia must have felt - and their descendants.  Because the settlement on Mars is 70 years old, when they face the stuggle they have with examining if they should stay with earth, and what right they have to be a world in their own right, it's like remembering our history - how the US colonists fought to not pay extra tax to England, about 150 years after the first settlers arrived.  When does a colony become a self-sufficient country or world?  In Moving Mars, we get to experience first hand the changes that Mars goes through, through the eyes of Casseia Majumdar, and through all the characters around her, especially Charles Franklin, who makes the scientific breakthrough in thinking and physics, that leads Earth to struggle with Mars for control of that power.  It was unputdownable. 

I loved how Casseia travels back to Earth early on, so we get to see how Earth has changed.  I was fascinated by the way Bear shows that economics and the hidden few that control the economic system, eventually paved the way for the different continents to come together in a power base, so there were several groupings that decided how the world would function as a unit as man moved into space - first the moon, and then Mars, were colonized.  People are the same, though how they connect has been changed by social networking - there is a very cool party scene that Casseia experiences while on Earth, that I could see the new generation coming up, wanting to create between their social plug-ins and desire to connect with as many people as possible, in many different ways.  It was fascinating.

I enjoyed the advances in science and technology that Bear explains made moving into space possible, and how life was possible on Mars - the physical contraints, and why they tunneled into Mars to live, rather than just living on the surface.  Most of all though, I enjoyed the idea of the thinkers, the super computers that eventually evolve to having a personality made when a person joins with them - goes into them, in a sense. The blending of human creativity with all that is known to exist, makes for an interesting way to see one possible future for the computers and internet and the vast possible ways we could interface together.  What do we do with knowledge?  Where can we go with it?  In Moving Mars, it eventually becomes possible to break down the smallest particle, to its essence, with thought - the space in the center of the smallest photon, is empty, surrounded by the energy charge that makes it positive or negative.  Out of this, the photon moves towards or from the photons surrounding it, and so we have the physical structure of life.  Once Charles is able to think his way to that structure, and with the help of a Thinker, join his mind to moving the photon, then moving in space becomes possible. I won't say any more, because I don't want to give away what he does, and why, though I will say that it was powerful to read, and very thought-provoking.  I also have to apologize if I got any of the science wrong, I'm sure I got a term in there wrong somewhere!

I read this for Carl's Sci Fi Experience, and also as part of my personal challenge to read more Hugo and Nebula winning science fiction. Moving Mars won the Nebula Award, and deservedly so.

We have 3 days left, and I have two more books to review for Carl's Sci Fi challenge.  If I'm lucky, I will have another one to add in time.  However, I am going to be continuing my science fiction reading this year.  I am participating in the Grandmaster Challenge at World's End blog, and I am having a ball finding new books and authors to read. 

I also am finding I am piling up other books to read very soon - The Morville Hours, and finish reading some books I started before Christmas, like The Most Beautiful Villages in England, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.  And, of course, Carl's Once Upon a Time Challenge will be starting very soon (I hope!), and I have several books out from the library already that fall into this fantasy/dark fantasy area. 

Finally, for a brief time:
Plus, I finally broke down and requested a book from our library, that it not currently being published and no copies are floating around:  The Winds of Marble Arch, the collected short stories of Connie Willis.  It finally came into my house yesterday.  I have it for a maximum of three renewals, and then I have to let this dear book (I already love it) out of my hands again.  I won't read it all in time for Carl's challenge, but it will fit into the Grandmaster reading challenge.  I love it because I have read a few short stories by Connie, and I know fabulous ideas await me.  Of course the very best news would be that Subterranean Press finally announces they are publishing the announced but never seen soft cover edition of Winds of Marble Arch.  Not yet. Sometimes, despite all our advances, other things get in the way of getting a book published.

I hope you have a week filled with good reading ahead also!