An interesting read if you like the Arthur Clarke style of hard sci-fi. The book shows its age, since it was written in 1980 about a future 1998. ( )

This book being in the SF Masterworks series, I had a bit of high expectations for it. Sadly, I feel they fell a bit short, but perhaps more due to my taste in sci-fi than to the book or story in itself.

This is a book about two scientists, their work, and the people who live around them in their two diferent timelines. It follows the later's work to contact the past to try and avoid the disaster that was Earth's environment, while everything around falls apart, and the earliest scientist's work to try and uncover the signals he gets in his experiments.

While this can make for a good book, it failed to grab me. It reads like a great exposition of the scientific method and the traps in academia with the backdrop of a time travel story, which was not what I had expected. ( )

I usually hate time travel stories because they make my head hurt, but this one makes a pleasant change from the norm. It's not people travelling back through time, and requiring some FTL technobabble device, but messages streamed through time by means of already FTL tachyon particles.

The story is told through the eyes of two sets of scientists. One team is based in Cambridge in the late nineties, in a world which is falling apart. The earth's climate has changed, algal blooms caused by pesticides are wreaking havoc on the oceans, and civilization is slowly starting to crumble under the pressure of sustained ecological chaos. The second team, consisting mostly of physicist Gordon Bernstein, is based in La Jolla, California in the early sixties.

It's interesting to compare and contrast between the two worlds: Gordon is an assistant professor at La Jolla, hungry for promotion and his chance to procure tenure. As with many of the greatest discoveries, his scientific breakthrough comes quite by accident: Bernstein and Cooper, his assistant, are running a series of experiments whose results are plagued by seemingly random noise. It is only when Bernstein analyzes the noise more completely that he realizes what he has found, and then he faces an uphill struggle to persuade his peers that he has found something worthy of further study.

Renfrew and Markham, by contrast, come across as much older and more worn. They're not at the start of their scientific careers, searching for glory and acclaim or to gain a quick promotion. Rather, their experiments offer hope, a last chance measure to stop the environmental disaster unfolding in their time before it has a chance to overshoot.

One of the things that I like most about this novel is the detailing of everyday academic life. The idea that a brilliant scientific discovery might be put on hold or pooh-poohed by the academic community at large because of departmental politics, or that one should refrain from publishing anything the slightest bit controversial because it might impact your standing amongst your fellow peers felt horribly familiar. ( )

Global warming message in an isotope, no bottle.

Scientists thirties years in the future from the sixties discover the possibilities for sending limited information back in time through the exotic properties of a particular material. It is pretty important to them because the situation the planet finds itself in is really pretty dire.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/06/timescape-gregory-benford.html ( )

Global warming message in an isotope, no bottle.

Scientists thirties years in the future from the sixties discover the possibilities for sending limited information back in time through the exotic properties of a particular material. It is pretty important to them because the situation the planet finds itself in is really pretty dire.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/06/timescape-gregory-benford.html ( )