Sequel to [book:The Peace War] and you should read it first, otherwise the ending is spoiled. This book is much better than the first and shows that Vernor Vinge has improved his writing style. One could even glimpse at some ideas that he will use in later books. ( )

Sequel to [book:The Peace War] and you should read it first, otherwise the ending is spoiled. This book is much better than the first and shows that Vernor Vinge has improved his writing style. One could even glimpse at some ideas that he will use in later books. ( )

An interesting murder mystery. Using statis bobbles, time can pass at a different rate for those outside. Therefore, being kicked out of one effectively strands you from your fellows, forever. Is this murder?

Millions of years after an event, a police officer must try and work out why this happened and who did it.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2006/12/marooned-in-realtime-vernor-vinge.html ( )

I really enjoyed Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, so I was eager to pick up some of his earlier work. I found this book to be a little bit of a disappointment. Marooned in Realtime certainly starts with a a great concept: a group of people pop out of stasis fields to discover that humanity has vanished from the earth pretty much without a trace. This leaves them in a bit of a predicament. They continue to use these stasis bubbles to make discreet jumps forward in time, but a clever killer manages to trap Marta, one of their leaders, outside the bubble, leaving her to live and ultimately die in solitude while every other surviving human lives on into the future inside the stasis field. The next time the group pops out into "realtime," they discover what has happened and set Brierson, a surviving lawman, to figure out what happened. I'd describe the book as a mystery that is more effective as science fiction than as a mystery.

The only character I developed much empathy for was Marta, who had forty years of solitude to figure out who had killed her, and to leave clues for those who would come later to investigate, knowing that the killer would be there to try to prevent any message from getting through. Marooned in Realtime is entertaining and suspenseful, but the ultimate resolution (especially the message from Brierson's long dead wife) left me only partially satisfied. ( )

Fantastic book, loved all the far-future implications of bobbles. The plot is a high-tech mystery/adventure set fifty million years in the future and Vinge keeps you on your toes. ( )