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Timescape

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Timescape

By: Gregory Benford
Narrated by: Simon Prebble, Pete Bradbury
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About this listen

 In a future wracked by environmental catastrophe and social instability, physicist John Renfrew devises a longshot plan to use tachyons - strange, time-traveling particles - to send a warning to the past. In 1962, Gordon Bernstein, a California researcher, gets Renfrew's message as a strange pattern of interference in an experiment he's conducting. As the two men struggle to overcome both the limitations of scientific knowledge and the politics of scientific research, a larger question looms: can a new future arise from the paradox of a forewarned past?

Winner of both the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Award for best science-fiction novel, Timescape is an enduring classic that examines the ways that science interacts with everyday life to create the many strange worlds in which we live.

©1980 Gregory Benford and Hilary Benford (P)2001 Recorded Books Science Fiction Fiction

Critic Reviews

  • Nebula Award, Best Novel, 1980
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The story had the typical futuristic predictions that didn't quite come to pass, but were less cringe-worthy than instead giving it some novel charm and interest.
The ideas that were most dated rather were all the lecturing and point-making about about how free their sexual lives were or weren't, and how so very liberated they were or weren't. That got a bit bogged down with a few identity crises characters were having and all the wrong kind of drama that entailed.
It was probably quite a good premise, but I think the audio version made it more difficult to actually keep straight through the different time jumps and whatever parallel universe sub-plots may have been happening (I got really confused there with the audio version).
I would have liked the book more if I hadn't felt like a teen male had kept inserting the word 'nipple' just for the sake of it, and that some characters were so intensely unlikeable that they distracted from everything else.

classic sci fi that let itself down somewhat

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