The Peace War
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Peace War is a science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge about authoritarianism and technological progress. It was first published as a serial in Analog in 1984, and then appeared in book form shortly afterward. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for 1984 but did not win. Its sequels are "The Ungoverned", a novella published in his collection True Names and Other Dangers and the novel Marooned in Realtime. All three would be collected in Across Realtime.
[edit] Plot summary
The story takes place 50 years after scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory develop "the ultimate weapon", a force field generating device, and use it to enforce an end to conventional warfare, calling themselves the Peace Authority. The Bobbler creates a perfectly spherical, impenetrable, and persistent shield around or through anything, and is used to contain nuclear weapons, people, and occasionally entire cities or governments, separating them from the rest of the world (and presumably killing everything inside by eventual suffocation and lack of sunlight).
In an effort to retain their monopoly on this weapon, they make technological progress illegal, and their power and fear of rebellion corrupts them. In this world, governments are weak, where they are permitted at all; the Peace Authority is the true bearer of power. A group of rebels, the Tinkers, develop technology clandestinely far beyond what the Authority can create (while limited to riding horseback and other Authority-mandated anachronisms), but still not a match for the bobble. One of the original scientists who developed the bobble is among them, however, and he develops a better version of the bobble which requires only computational power, and not the huge electrical power sources available only to the Peace.
It is discovered by the Tinkers (and much later by the Peace) that the bobbles are actually not force fields, but stasis fields; regions in which time has stopped. So not only are the contents perfectly preserved in the state that they were bobbled, but they open spontaneously after a certain time period. The Tinkers use their knowledge and the Peacers' ignorance of this effect to their advantage (bobbling themselves for short time periods, for instance), and with the help of a young thief (and mathematical genius) they lead a rebellion to try to bobble the power generators of the Peace Authority and neutralize their primary weapon.
