As ecological catastrophe spreads in 1998, a team of scientists at Cambridge attempt to send a warning back to 1962 using tachyons.

The story alternates between the transmitters and the receivers, with the reader feeling a mounting sense of despair as to whether the warning will be deciphered or acted upon. Excellently done. ( )

There are two timelines in this story: one in sort-of mid-apocalyptic 1998, when algae blooms and mass extinctions have triggered the beginning of the end it seems, and one in 1962, when scientists at UCLA are conducting some sort of physics experiment involving tachyons...? Anyway, the future scientists (aka those in 1998 - the book was published in 1980) figure out that they can send a message via tachyons to the 1962 scientists, warning them of the impending doom. But they don't want to make it too clear or else the Grandfather Paradox would kick in and...it...wouldn't...work? But somehow it sort of doesn't work anyway (but also sort of does), because, I'm guessing, butterfly wings and then Kennedy gets shot but not killed? Because physics! Gah. I give up. There's way too much science talk and not nearly enough make-it-make-sense-to-the-reader talk. I got confused. And then I got bored. Which I think would have happened without the confusion - it takes just this side of forever for any actual plot to be bothered to happen. So nope, this one didn't really work for me. ( )

Ugh what a slog. Lots and lots and lots and lots of talking. Professors in laboratories, scholars in offices, etc.....lots of talking and no showing. I'm sure the time-travel science is solid, but it's incomprehensible to the average person. I don't have a PhD, but I'm not an idiot either, and I was lost as to how the hell this transfer of information through time was happening. Interesting concept, just difficult to comprehend. There's explanation of how paradoxes are dealt with and how time branches off and creates other time streams. This was fascinating, but he spends little time exploring this concept. I wanted more of it.

There are many interchangeable characters and the the story jumped back and forth in time often. These two things coupled with a dense writing style that did not flow well made for a rocky reading experience...... ( )

Dull, with a soupçon of “women are not important” (and I’m a man myself), characters who lack character and are hard to tell apart, and so far (I’m a third in) nothing has happened. Long passages of people explaining things to one another that they ought to know already. No charm, no surprises, and a very uninspired imagining of the near future (at the time). It gets 2 stars for being competently written (I try to save 1 star for "how did this get published???" books), but I am clearly the other end of the target market for this kind of fiction, and I'm stunned that it would win any award, let alone something so major.

Time to abandon and find something more fulfilling. ( )

This is probably the best book about time I've ever read.

The fact that Gregory Benford is a physicist is obvious throughout the book.
First, to the questions regarding time travel, time paradoxes, alternate universes, he gives his well documented answers in accordance with modern physics, and they are bewildering by the fact that they do not contradict what we know so far about this universe.
Whenever I read something about time travel I say to myself nice story" but never take it seriously. This is not the case here - this book raises questions about the very essence of time. What is time, really?

Second, Benford does a good job in describing the world of the scientists - his characters are well portrayed and interesting.

This is SF at its best. It will teach you something about physics, it will make you sympathise with the characters and it will make an exciting and intriguing reading." ( )