This is very early Vinge, much less complicated, and shorter than his later books, but still excellent. This is actually 2 novels in one book. Something about these novels has always stayed in my mind, some combination of the technology and personalities is memorable. ( )

Apparently some editions of this work contain three stories - mine only contains the two novels "The Peace War" and "Marooned in Realtime".

Both stories are centered around the idea of a technology which can created isolated spherical regions of space/time, called "bobbles". A bobble appears as a mirrored sphere enclosing the region of space around which it was created. It has the same mass as its contents, can be moved around like any other object in space, and is absolutely indestructible.

The first story takes place about 50 years after the discovery of bobbles, describing how they were used in a surprise attack by a group determined to end all warfare. The result is a tyrannical "peace" with heavy restrictions on the development and use of many kinds of technology. Naturally, groups opposed to this kind of "peace" fight to overthrow the Peace Authority.

Restrictions on technology have backfired on the oppressors, as their own technology has been held back while underground development in a resistance movement has leapfrogged them in several key areas. The breakthrough comes when the resistance is able to develop their own technology to manipulate bobbles, and an interesting confrontation results as old military tactics are thrown out the window.

The second story takes place on a post-singularity earth. The events of the singularity itself are a mystery to all - the human race appears to have just disappeared, and the only survivors are those who were inside bobbles at the time. Bobbles effectively provide a form of one-way time travel, and so eventually over millennia groups of survivors band together until the last 300 or so humans are in one place preparing to form a colony to restart the human race.

The colonists are divided into the "low-tech" and "hi-tech". The hi-tech colonists are those who have access to technology from just prior to the singularity, and the difference is so substantial that they're basically all trans-human entities heavily augmented by their technology. When one of the key hi-tech colonists is murdered through a subtle but malicious corruption of their systems, it becomes a race to find the murderer before the human race dwindles into extinction.

I enjoyed the first of these stories much more than the second, though both were good reading. This is a prime example of the kind of science fiction which takes a single simple idea and follows it through in a series of mind-bending "what-ifs". The means by which bobbles might be created is never discussed, and is unimportant to the story. The question of what it might mean if they could be created is the important one, and the two stories here do a very good job at exploring the possibilities. ( )

I greatly enjoyed this collection of three novels linked by the theme of 'bobbles' (a sort of spherical stasis field), in spite of the implausibility of some of the ideas.

The Peace War
is set in a near-future world in which 'bobbles' have been invented and used to end a nuclear war by enclosing (bobbling) nuclear bombs, even exploding ones, and many military installations. There have also been plagues, probably caused by genetically modified pathogens, which have severely depleted the human population. An organisation called the 'Peace Authority' has gained complete control of bobble technology and has imposed a tyranny on the world, though, luckily, large sparsely populated areas of North America are still under rather loose control. Here a group of people known as Tinkers continues to develop science and technology, although The Peace distrusts and fears all scientific endevour, especially genetics. One of the Tinkers is the original inventor of the bobble principle, now quite old. He recruits as his apprentice a young genius, who is on the run from a life of slavery in one of the fiefdoms to which The Peace has delegated much of local control in what was California. They find that the original ideas about the effects of bobbles were seriously wrong. With their new theoretical foundation, they are able to produce much smaller and more efficient bobble generators and achieve much more control over the bobbles produced. Thus the Tinkers now have bobble technology of their own to use against the hated Peace Authority ... and so the world was saved.

The Ungoverned
is set quite a bit later than The Peace War. North America is divided into governed states, of which the most powerful is New Mexico, and anarchist areas, which naturally enjoy a more satisfying lifestyle and greater prosperity, as well as being the source of all significant scientific and technological progress. New Mexico attempts to extend its power by annexing some anarchist territory, but the invaders are defeated by a combination of spontaneous organisation of free individuals, co-operation among the private police organisations (most people employ these to enforce their rights, when necessary) and the actions of farmers who are heavily armed and paranoid about preventing trespassing.

One of the main characters is the anarchist policeman Wil Brierson, who is central to the next part.

Marooned in Realtime
is set in a post-singularity world. (See Vernor Vinge on the singularity or Wikipedia.) It is not known what happened at the singularity, but quite a few people missed it due to being bobbled at the time. Wil Brierson was one of these: some enemy spitefully contrived to bobble him in order to banish him to a distant future without his family and friends. Some other survivors are in the future for similar reasons, but others have voluntarily bobbled into the future for various reasons. Some of them lived not long before the singularity and are equipped with advanced devices and medicines.
Some of the technically advanced survivors have been gathering are are continuing to gather survivors as they debobble, hoping to assemble a sufficiently large group to provide enough genetic variation to restart a viable human race. Some of the high-tech people however don't care about the race, they are happy with personal (near)immortality. Among those who do want to restart the race, there are the three old factions from the first two books: Peace Authority, democracy and similar, and anarchism.
One of the high-techs, a leading light in organising racial survival, is murdered by being debobbled early during a general jump forward of 50,000 years (needed in order to join up with another group). There is a lot about her life as the only human in the world and cut of from technology, which means that she can survive for only a few decades. When the crime is discovered, the victim's sister urges Wil Brierson, the policeman from the second book, to find the culprit, which is not easy when the trail is so cold.

Contains the two short novels "The Peace War" and "Marooned in Realtime". While excellent as fiction, these two novels give the reader a clear understanding of the nature of accelerating change and the coming technological singularity. Highly recommended! ( )