Marooned in Realtime

Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge is a loose sequel to The Peace War. The novel takes place millions of years after the events of the previous one: now few-hundred-strong remnants of humankind are on the brink of extinction. The novel's carrying narrative is a murder mystery but the science fiction was far more interesting. The genre's typically weak characterization leaves the investigation lukewarm.

Since everything inside a bobble, created by the bobbler technology introduced in the first book, is in a perfect stasis and the bobble is affected only by gravity, it's an easy and safe way to travel, even extremely far, into the future. Well, it's safe as long as the bobble doesn't end up, say, sinking too deep underground -- or dropping into the sun. The bobbles also solve the problem of realistic interstellar travel taking so damn long. I hadn't considered these possibilities.

Some characters in the novel are on a one-way pilgrimage to see the end of time. Some have originally bobbled forward just to get an instantaneous advancement in current day technology. And some are there unintentionally, having been trapped in a bobble without their consent and picked up by other time travelers along their way.

One thing the intentional travelers didn't account for is that humanity might at some point disappear without a trace and there would be no one to greet them when popping out of a bobble jump. Despite all their advanced tech, the survivors couldn't figure out why humanity in the Solar System stopped existing somewhere in the 23rd century. Was it a war, an alien invasion, or perhaps the result of reaching a (technological) singularity -- a word whose use in that sense Vinge is considered to have popularized.

The closer to the extinction event a person in the novel started their journey through time, the higher their technological superiority is compared to the rest. 'High-techs' have defeated aging, carry helpful implants, have spaceships, and command scores of automatons. They are much like the independent Conjoiners in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series. Meanwhile 'low-techs' are on 21st century level: your regular-ass humans.

There is unrest among the factions of the survivors and the strongest of the high-techs try to keep things in control: everybody still existing is needed to restart humanity -- and perhaps to try eventually reach their own singularity. The high-techs are also unable to restock their resources because it would take a whole civilization's manufacturing capabilities to do.

At the start of the novel, there is a rescue operation of digging up a sunken bobble of Peace Authority folks from the Peace War times, using nuclear explosions, so that it will be safely on the surface in a few thousand years when the bobble is set to pop. The operation is a success but shortly afterwards the colony bobbles into the future unscheduled and further than planned, leaving behind one of the unity-minded high-techs, Marta Korolev. While Marta doesn't age, surviving alone on Earth with limited resources and for thousands of years (or however far they jumped) is not possible.

Marta's partner, Yelén, determines the incident was a murder and tasks the novel's protagonist Wil Brierson to find out which one of the colony's seven high-techs did it. Wil is a low-tech but was sort of a police in his time before he got trapped in a bobble and whisked away from his family and friends.

Yelén sets one of the high-techs as Wil's partner -- and as a protector in case the murderer tries to take him out. The high-tech in question is Della Lu from the first book in which she was a double agent but has since moved on from the Peace War nonsense. In fact, she has almost moved on from being a human as well: of the millions of years passed, Della has spent over 9000 in realtime, during which she has traveled to the stars to encounter the remnants of other species and then back again. She's probably the most interesting character in the novel for that.

Like The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime didn't feel like a scifi novel written in the 1980s. Its science fiction feels more recent, quite like the mentioned Reynolds's works. The way the book, both of them, mention people's races doesn't feel very current day, though.