Marooned in Realtime
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 Cover of first edition (hardcover) |
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| Author | Vernor Vinge |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Tom Kidd |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Across Real Time |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Bluejay Books/ St. Martin's Press |
| Released | 1986 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 270 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-312-94295-8 |
| Preceded by | The Ungoverned, (1985) |
Marooned in Realtime is a 1986 murder mystery and time-travel science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge, about a small group of people who are the only "survivors" of a technological singularity. It is the sequel to The Peace War. Both novels and the novella "The Ungoverned" were collected in Across Realtime.
Marooned in Realtime won the Prometheus Award in 1987 and was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel that same year.
[edit] Plot summary
In the story, a device exists which can create a "bobble", a spherical stasis field in which time stands still, allowing one-way instantaneous time travel into the future. These persistent, frictionless, perfectly reflective spheres are also used as weapons, as shields against other weapons, for storage, for space travel (combined with nuclear pulse propulsion), and many other purposes.
People whose bobbles open up after a certain date in the 23rd century find the Earth completely devoid of human life. All living humans have disappeared, with only ambiguous archeological clues for the reasons, and only those who were inside bobbles during the event survive into the future. Those who were bobbled soon after the original invention of bobbles have roughly modern technology. Those who were bobbled later in time (closer to the singularity) have vastly superior technology, including cybernetic enhancements, faster and thought-controlled bobblers, personal automaton extensions of self, space ships, medical technology to allow immortality, and individual arsenals comparable to entire countries of the modern day.
The protagonist is Wil Brierson, a detective who also was the protagonist of the preceding novella "The Ungoverned". Some time after the events in "The Ungoverned", Brierson was bobbled against his will 10,000 years into the future to prevent his testimony in a case, effectively murdering him. As a punishment, the law enforcement of his time period bobbled such criminals for a slightly longer amount of time than their victims, with a message explaining the crime and allowing future law enforcement to provide more specific punishment, after the true fate of the victim can be determined. However, in this unpopulated world, every human is valuable, and the high-techs give the criminals new false identities to protect them from their victims and welcome them into their small society.
The group of several hundred people seeks to gather up all the humans left in order to gain enough genetic diversity to create a new civilization and their own singularity. They travel into the future so that they can recruit colonies of people, ending approximately 50 million years ahead in order to gather one of the largest groups trapped inside one of the earliest but longest-lived bobbles.
Before one of their very long transits, the computers of one of the high-tech project leaders, Marta Korolev, are hacked, and she is excluded from the automated bobbling. Left stranded in normal time, with her bobbling capability blocked, she is left to die alone after a natural lifespan on a deserted Earth. When the "murder" is discovered, the low-tech Brierson is hired by the surviving project leader, who is also the victim's "widow", Yelén Korolev, to find the killer, who has to be one of the powerful high techs.
Della Lu, a high tech who was an agent of the Peace Authority during The Peace War, agrees to assist Brierson with the technical aspects of the case. In the millions of years since the singularity, Della had spent 9,000 years alone outside of stasis in real time, exploring the galaxy and searching for signs of similar vanishings in intelligent species on other planets. While waiting for others to emerge into realtime, she determined that intelligent life is profoundly rare, and there were parallel vanishings in the few civilizations she found, but no definitive proof of what happened. The singularity, whatever the cause, is implied to be an explanation for the Fermi Paradox. To complicate matters, being a high tech, Della Lu is also a suspect, and the vast amount of time she has spend alone in deep space and in real time leave questions about whether she is still human. Furthermore, Yelén Korolev herself is a suspect.
The novel thus deals with the investigation of two parallel locked room mysteries: the murder of Marta Korelev, and the "locked planet" mystery of the disappearance of the human race. Brierson interviews each of the high-tech suspects, seeking evidence of any motive for murder while discussing their views on how the human race vanished. While some suggest that an alien invasion, ecological collapse, or other disaster was the culprit, by the end it is strongly suggested that this event was a technological singularity, and that the human race had transcended to a different form of existence with the assistance of exponentially improving technology.
[edit] Publication
- Originally serialized in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, May-August 1986.
- Vernor Vinge (1986). Marooned In Realtime. St. Martin's Press/Bluejay Books. ISBN 0-312-94295-8.
- Vernor Vinge (1991). Across Realtime. Baen. ISBN 0-671-72098-8. — combined publication with The Peace War and "The Ungoverned".
