Read this last night. It's Varley for sure - more typical than I expected. But come on - a deus ex machina named BC for an ending? Makes me wonder what else I missed on the way through (I did catch some of the chapter titles).

In the end I guess the whole universe was just too unremittingly depressing for me to like it. Not shocking repulsive, just repetitively dull and dreary, especially the ending. The light at the end of the tunnel was too small, too far away and too dim to brighten it up at all. ( )

Just remembered having read this when the synopsis of another book sounded similar. Might have to see if I can find another copy somewhere, although I remember it being so very very 80's - could be painful to revisit. ( )

five stars bcs this book kept me up, kept me turning the pages, kept me speculating and didn't let me down .




( )

Back in the early 1990s I fell into the habit of reading the novels which were being adapted into movies. This was a bad habit as I read a lot of rubbish, including "Millennium".

In the present, a plane crash investigator realises something odd is happening with the passengers, and, of all the possible reasons for the oddness, it turns out that its people 50 000 years in the future taking the passengers moments before the crash and sending them back to the future to help populate Earth. The sentence I just wrote actually makes the book sound more interesting than it is. ( )

The book opens as the investigation into the tragic collision of two jumbo jets near Oakland is commencing. Sections relating the details of the investigation are interspersed with sections set in a time hundreds of years in the future in which people travel back in time to incidents in which everyone is killed (i.e. plane crashes), stun the passengers, send them to the future, and replace them with already dead bodies from the future, just before the crash. But why?

As the present day investigation proceeds various anomalies are discovered and can't be explained. The future is also changing, as the result of errors the team sending people from the past into the future may have made.

This is the first book by Varley that I've read, and it was a good one. It was very logical and real--there were no, "I can't suspend my disbelief for this," moment, and I was kept turning the pages. Recommended.

3 stars ( )