Gregory Benford
1980
Awards: Nebula, Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
Timescape
is set in the very near future. The back story is that pesticides
developed in the past few decades have made their ways into our oceans
and have started changing the cellular structure of microorganisms
there. These altered microorganisms consume oxygen-producing algae and
are spreading like mad, slowly destroying the entire food chain. By 1998
(which is the future, in this book) this has led to massive shortages,
poverty, and crime, and things are getting worse fast.
Meanwhile,
a group of scientists has discovered that if they broadcast tachyons in
controlled bursts to a specific location in galactic space – to a
location that the Earth used to occupy – they can send a coded signal
back in time. If they want to send a signal back 50 years, for example,
they would beam the tachyons towards the point in space where the Earth
would have been 50 years ago. They figure if they can do this, they can
let the scientists of the past know about the dangers of the pesticides
before the pesticides even get manufactured, and thus the future will be
changed for the better.
The tricky part is that the scientists
of the past don’t know about tachyons yet and won’t know the message is
coming so they won't be looking for it. So the scientists of 1998 have
to beam the tachyons to a time when they know there were nuclear
resonance experiments going on and basically cross their fingers, hoping
that the tachyons will come up as noise in those experiments and that
the scientists of the past will see the noise, realize that the noise
has a pattern, figure out how to decode the pattern, and believe it once
they have decoded it.
The nuclear resonance experimenters of
1963 do pick up the noise, fortunately, but then have to go through a
methodical scientific process of trying to figure out what it is. It
feels agonizingly slow. They go down several blind alleys and get
distracted by outside events. I wanted to yell at them, “It’s a message
from the future already! Hurry up and figure it out before it’s too
late!” But it is also realistic; you can't expect responsible scientists
to go any faster with something like this. And this creates good
suspense.
The science is, in fact, the best part of Timescape. Gregory Benford is a physicist himself, so the theories, processes, laboratories, and equipment are believable and solid.
The
details of academia also add a lot of color and clearly are written by
someone who knows what he's talking about. The characters go through
totally realistic classes, publications, advisory sessions, departmental
squabbles, presentations at inter-disciplinary colloquia, and even a
doctoral candidacy examination.
Being a time-travel story of a
sort, the book raises the usual questions about paradoxes. In
particular, if the scientists of 1963 prevent the development of the
pesticides, then the scientists of 1998 won't need to send the message
back in time anymore. Will that mean that they won't have sent it after
all and we will get stuck in an endless paradox loop? Or will the
scientists of 1998 emerge from their lab babbling like madmen about an
environmental catastrophe that everyone else knows was avoided decades
ago? Benford’s resolution of all this is interesting.
What drags
the book down is the human-interest filler stuck in between the
scientific parts. I was totally bored by the personal lives of the
scientists in both 1963 and 1998. I didn’t care about their love
interests or their emotional baggage.
Also, when the characters
are not talking about physics, their conversations are stilted and
awkward. This is particularly true for the British characters, who sound
forced and inauthentic. One of the Britons uses the word “sod” three
times on one page and it clunks all three times.
Fortunately, the
human interest sections make up only about a third of the book. If you
skip over all of them, it makes for quite a good story.
(Note: see No Enemy But Time for a slightly different resolution to a similar time-travel paradox.)
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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