We Read Science Fiction

So I’m on a scifi binge again… only this time it’s Robert J Sawyer’s stuff. After reading Calculating God I moved on to FlashForward and am now on the verge of finishing Rollback (review soon… but it’s GOOD). I’ve got more of his books on my shelf that are unread, so this streak may continue for a few more books. We’ll see.

FlashForward however, was disappointing and not nearly on par with his later Hugo wining/nominated works like the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. It was certainly and interesting idea and worth the read time I spent on it, but it wasn’t groundbreaking or really special in any way.

Summary: Don’t buy it, but read it if someone lends it to you. A 2/5.

The idea is simple: A freak combination of physics experiments causes every single human on the planet to passively experience two minutes of their respective distant futures. When it’s over there is much confusion, carnage and chaos as a result of the whole world “blacking out” for that time. Cars crash, people die and everyone panics.

When people realize that everyone experienced the exact same moment in time from billions of different viewpoints, people start to put together databases of these experiences so that correlations can be drawn and the future predicted. There is much debate about fate and free-will amongst the characters, and at times it gets preachy on both sides. In the end it turns out that the future CAN be changed in small ways here and there, but as a whole the future largely progresses along a destined path.

The concept could be very interesting and it certainly starts out very well (I added it to my must-reads list on the Amazon sidebar half way through).. but it just stalled in terms of pace, ingenuity and interest about half way through.

Read it if you find it at the library, but don’t go out of your way to find it.