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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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classic sci fi that let itself down somewhat

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.

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