Marooned in Real Time

This is basically the starting question of the book (which thus forms one of Vinge's quite different explorations of the concept he coined in 1982), but that only becomes clear as the larger story comes together in the last third of the book. (Sorry if this a spoiler…)

On the way there, we follow a post-civilisational whodunnit through several centuries, compressed into short bursts of subjective time, slowly understand that the difference between the "low techs" and "high techs" that make up the small community of surviving humans populating the book is smaller than we thought, and get thrown a few plot-twist curveballs. Vintage Vinge, so to speak.

Which is also the book's drawback: The political agenda a little too clear, the dismissal of alternative world-views (e.g. an ecological one) a little too quick, the psychology a little too shallow.

But as always: a fun, inspired and at times inspiring read.

What if we could place people, buildings, or whole cities in frozen balls of time to open years, centuries, even hundreds of thousands of years in the future as if no time had passed for them at all? In MAROONED IN REALTIME (and the preceding THE PEACE WAR), this technology exists in the form of "bobbles". A private investigator is bobbled in to the future by a panicked criminal. Years later (in what feels like moments later to him) he finds himself in a world where all but a couple hundred of the human race have been destroyed or disappeared. While bobbling ahead to await the opening of a massive bobble that has kept another hundred or so people in stasis since the 21st century (and therefore provide a large enough genetic pool to re-start the human race) one of the two organizers of humanity's last best hope is trapped outside of the her bobble and forced to live the remaining years of her life alone and without technology. The focus of the rest of the book involves this private investigator researching her "murder".

The final third of this book was wonderful. Exciting, interesting,
creative, good hard sci-fi. The problem I had was getting through the
first two thirds. While I say it all paid off in the final acts, I felt like the book took far too long to get off the ground. It's possible that the last third wouldn't have been as rewarding without the long, patient setup before it. But I can't help but think the first sections of the book would have benefited from being tightened up a bit.

But as a whole, the book explores great ideas and themes such as the rapid progress of technology, elective immortality, the singularity, and the ability to jump forward in time... even all the way to the end of the world. Even in his earlier works, Vernor Vinge fails to disappoint.