Marooned In Real Time

Most murder mysteries require a locked room, a poisoned drink and someone in a monocle saying, “But how could he have got out?” Vernor Vinge’s has a victim who is locked outside—outside an impenetrable time-bubble, on an empty Earth, fifty million years in the future. By the time anyone realises what has happened, the murderer has had geological time to tidy up.

In Vinge’s future, “bobbles” are spheres of absolute stasis. Enter one, set the timer and, when it opens, you emerge in the future without having aged a second. It is the ultimate one-way ticket, useful for escaping wars, waiting out difficult political periods and, as it turns out, leaping across the disappearance of the entire human race.

A few hundred survivors have drifted through the ages this way, collecting one another from the ruins of civilisation and trying to decide what humanity ought to do next. Settle down and rebuild? Keep hopping forward, hoping someone else has solved the problem? Or accept the increasingly awkward possibility that mankind has not been wiped out at all, but has simply gone somewhere beyond the reach of people still using matter and common sense?

Wil Brierson is an old-fashioned detective, which makes him almost as much a historical artefact as the vanished human world. He was taken from his own time against his will and sent forward ten thousand years, losing his wife, children and whole life in the process. Now he is asked to investigate a death among people whose machinery is effectively magical, whose bodies and minds have been improved beyond recognition and whose security systems could outwit most armies. It is fortunate that murderers, however advanced, still tend to be vain, frightened and convinced they are cleverer than everyone else.

The mystery plays out among the last scraps of humanity: high-tech immortals, low-tech survivors, people with private arsenals, people with private philosophies and people who have spent so long leaping over history that ordinary human attachment has become something of an antique. Vinge gives them all enormous technological power, then watches them bring the same old motives along with them. Envy survives. Ambition survives. Suspicion survives. The species may have advanced beyond death, but it still cannot resist a row.

What makes the book linger is the immense silence around the case. Fifty million years is not merely a long time. It is long enough for continents to change their minds, mountains to be worn down and all the familiar signs of human existence to vanish completely. These survivors are not picking through the ruins of civilisation. They are living after the ruins have become geology.

Marooned in Real Time is clever, fast and pleasantly merciless about its own grand ideas. It is part detective story, part hard science fiction and part meditation on what people would do if the future finally arrived and there was nobody left to explain it. The cleverest thing about it may be that, amid all the time travel, superhuman technology and vanished civilisations, it remembers that a proper mystery still depends on someone asking the irritatingly obvious question: who benefits?

Condition: Very Good. A remarkably well-preserved Pan paperback for a novel that spends fifty million years waiting for something to happen. It has survived the journey with rather more dignity than most of humanity.

Keep browsing: See more Science-Fiction books Other books by Vernor Vinge