The few hundred individuals who remain have been rescued from their scattered bobbles by a group of super-technological aristocrats whose aim is to re-establish civilization some 50 million years after the Singularity. He re-enters real time to discover that most of the human race has disappeared.

Its black hero, Wil Brierson, is a 21st-century policeman who has been bobbled against his will.

'Īmong other things, the novel is a high-tech detective story. One chapter begins, quite casually: 'Some fifty thousand years later. It uses the bobble technology to transport its characters into the distant future, through the Singularity and into the vast empty fields of time which lie beyond. Marooned in Realtime goes several steps further, however. The concept is not new - there have been stasis fields aplenty in science fiction ranging from early stories by Robert Heinlein to recent works by Larry Niven - but The Peace War was notable for its logical working-out of the many consequences of such a far-fetched invention (not least the implications for warfare). In short, bobbles are one-way time machines. That novel concerned the 21st-century invention of manageable stasis fields - small, spherical oases of timelessness, known as 'bobbles.' By 'bobbling' human beings can move themselves (not to mention their houses, furniture, computers and spacecraft) forward in time, in predetermined jumps which may range from a few minutes' duration to millions of years. Marooned in Realtime is a sequel to Vinge's The Peace War (1984). (On the other hand, such a vanishing is the timelike analog of the silence we find all across the sky.)' At any rate, a universal vanishing act is this novel's objective correlative for the coming technological Singularity in a one-page Afterword he reinforces his point (and sends a shiver down the spine) by stating: 'of course it seems very unlikely that the Singularity would be a clean vanishing of the human race. Vernor Vinge posits a technological 'Singularity' which we are approaching on an exponential curve he cannot describe this tremendous event, since it is inherently unknowable, but he suggests that when the day of Singularity dawns (a couple of centuries hence?) humanity will transcend real time forever and vanish into the empyrean. All our languages, arts, and communications technologies are attempts to transcend 'real time,' and the more we surround ourselves with electronic gadgets, the more we are striving to escape the quotidian, to impose our own forms on time and space. It is the lot of the naked human being to follow the way of all flesh, day by day, year by year. VERNOR VINGE'S Marooned in Realtime (Bluejay, $ 17.95) has a title which describes the human condition.

Time and time again novel