The novel “Marooned in Realtime” by Vernor Vinge was published for the first time in 1986 serialized in the magazine “Analog” and then as a book. It’s the sequel to “The Peace War“. It won the Prometheus Award.
About 50 million years in the future, Yelen and Marta Korolev managed to organize the survivors of humanity after its mysterious extinction occurred in the 23rd century. The two women are part of the hi-tech group, people who lived in the last decades before the Extinction, and are trying to create a future for their species.
The survivors leap forward in time using the bobbles, spherical force fields that completely isolate whatever they contain. The computer that runs Yelen and Marta Korolev’s system is sabotaged and the result is that Marta can’t leap forward with the others but gets sort of marooned in time. Wil Brierson, one of the few survivors who has some experience as a police officer is charged with finding the culprit with the help of Della Lu.
“Marooned in Realtime” is the second novel in the series called Realtime or Bobble, a reference to the bobbles, the force fields whose invention eventually start a war that ravages the world. The bobbles are used as weapons to imprison enemy installations and create barriers impossible to cross. In this novel the bobbles are used to leap forward in time.
In 1985, Vernor Vinge wrote the novella “The ungoverned”, set after “The Peace War” with Wil Brierson as its protagonist. Della Lu was among the characters of the first novel and reading it is useful to better understand bobble technology but the characters have changed over time so it’s not essential to have read it to understand them.
Essentially, Vernor Vinge took the concept of bobbles and some characters to write “Marooned in Realtime”, a story completely different from the previous ones in the series. The setting is moved to a very distant future and if “The Peace War” could be considered post-apocalyptic this second novel is even more of that kind because it takes place after humanity’s extinction.
In “Marooned in Realtime” Vernor Vinge keeps on developing some of the ethic themes of the first novel in another idea-based story. In this case there’s no longer an organized society as only a few hundred humans survived the Extinction, a mysterious event that caused the almost complete disappearance of the human species apart from the few ones closed in the bobbles or traveling in space such as of Lu.
Yelen and Marta Korolev managed to organize the survivors looking for the various bobbles and using them to leap forward in the future in order to meet all together in the same period. However, humanity’s future is still to be decided and there are various factions with very different ideas on how to do it. It’s a basic concept that has a grandeur rarely seen even in the science fiction genre.
The ethical issues are developed starting from the fact that the survivors are divided into two main groups: hi-techs and low-techs. Hi-techs are the people who began their journey in the last decades before the Extinction, when the level of technology reached its peak. Low-techs are the people who began their journey earlier so they don’t have very advanced technology. This division generates various contrasts but there are also others because even if the survivors are a small group they manage to find ways to fight.
In this scenario the crisis occurs when someone is able to penetrate into the system that manages the bobbles with the result that Marta Korolev remains blocked while all the other survivors leap forward closed in the bobbles. It’s interesting that this is considered a murder even if the victim takes a few decades to die.
Wil Brierson is in charge of the investigation and Della Lu assists him because she’s a hi-tech. As a detective story honestly it’s far from exceptional as substantially the investigation consists in questioning various hi-techs, the only ones who could have the skills needed to hack into the computer system, and in reading the diaries left by Marta Korolev.
In the end, the investigation is mostly an excuse to develop the scenario of that distant future with the underlying mystery of the Extinction and the other themes of the novel. Vernor Vinge still managed to make an interesting and likely mystery linked to the hacking of a computer system showing his expertise in the field.
The flaws of “Marooned in Realtime” are similar to those of the first novel, in particular concerning the characters, of which just a few are developed. Paradoxically, in some ways Marta Korolev is the best developed character even if she appears only at the beginning of the novel because reading the diaries she left when she’s “marooned” is an important part of the investigation.
Nevertheless, in my opinion “Marooned in Realtime” is even better of “The Peace War”. It’s my subjective opinion due in particular to the fact that I found the basic concepts of the Extinction mystery and above all the leaps forward in time using the bobbles really extraordinary and evocative. For these reasons, I recommend reading it, even better after reading the first novel.
