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.