The Depths of Time

This book was better than I remembered. I read this back in 2000 or 2001 for part of a SF/F book club. I remember the reception towards the book being fairly lukewarm and maybe that colored my memory of it, or at least my vague feelings towards it, because I remembered nothing about the book at all. While the book has some very interesting passages, there's not a lot of story here. There are a few key events that occur, and they are filled out with a lot of worldbuilding and concept exploration in the form of character monologues or dialogues. I found many of these parts to be fascinating, which was good, because the story had almost stalled or seriously slowed down. The story here can be very simply broken down into a contest of wills show more between two characters, with one personifying duty, and the other pride. The science wasn't overwhelming, in fact, in some parts it is glossed over, especially when it comes to terraforming. Also, for a story that takes place in the far future, the tech doesn't seem like its 3000 years ahead of ours, but more like 300-500 years ahead. But that was just a small observation. It didn't hamper my enjoyment of the book. I found the story compelling enough that I want to see where it goes next. show less

This book was not well written. Full of cliches (space battles; the thawing of Han Solo; a ripoff of Asimov's "psychohistory" that makes much less sense), dull characters, bad dialogue. The biggest problem is the lack of relationships between the characters--they share no mutual interests, and have no real friendships and show no interest in human companionship. There's no animosity, either. The characters spend the whole book talking as if they're delivering the exposition on an episode of Star Trek. I just didn't care what happened to them. It seems the author doesn't care either.

The only positive part of the book is a what-seemed-to-me-original description of libraries and archives in the far future.

Not worth the time; ends in show more mid-story to induce you to buy the sequels (which I won't of course). show less

This didn't work for. I struggled along for a couple of chapters, but I just couldn't buy the basic premise of using wormhole time jumps to deal with the effect of time dilation when travelling at speeds approaching that of light.
The writing wasn't bad, but not quite good enough to hook me with such a background setting.

One of the best and most scientifically plausible was Robert L Forward's _Timemaster_ (1992).