Start Reading Timescape Penned By Gregory Benford Formatted As Bound Copy

about time travel are almost all trash,
This book is a stark exception,
It is serious without being selfimportant,
Hard science fiction without being stuffy,
Best of all, many of the main characters are physicists, which made me happy, The Coolness

This book won the Nebula in! Pretty cool for it and the author, sitelinkGregory Benford, It would have been nice for Hilary Foister to share in the credit, though, considering she supposedly cowrote this with Benford,

It deals with tachyons! once in a while

It works well as a mild sedative,

The Meh!ness

There are some cool bits of forward thinking in this book, although none of them are truly prophetic, and they needed to be if they were going to be better than average.
Benford and Foister project some terrorism in New York which is a bit like a SciFi writer suggesting that someday the Boston Red Sox would once again win the World Series, some ecological disaster, some biological disaster, some poverty and some hunger.
Wow! That's bravely walking the plank, isn't it

This book receives much praise for its “strong” characterization, but Ive always felt that strong characterization requires more than just time spent with the characters it also requires a thorough understanding of at least one characters depths and shallows.
We need to get inside a character and really experience the meat of him/her, Not so here. We meet quite a few characters, mostly men, spending a lot of time with Ian Peterson a womanizing English “gentleman”, John Renfrew a whiny physicist from England of the nineties, and Gordon Bernstein a whiny physicist from the US of the sixties, but I never felt like I knew any of them well, nor did I want to get to know them any better.
If this really is the strongest aspect of sitelinkTimescape, it is a fine example of why this book deserves no accolades,

The Crapness

There is no way in hell this book deserved the Nebula award inor any other time, How it beat books like sitelinkJoan D Vinges sitelinkThe Snow Queen or sitelinkWalter Tevis sitelinkMockingbird I will never understand, This book was barely SciFi, and I think I would have appreciated it far more if the clever little time messaging business had been taken out completely, A novel about Scientific competition in the sixties would have been good enough for me, and it was the story sitelinkBenford and sitelinkFoister were telling anyway, and I wouldn't have spent the bulk of the novel hoping for the SciFi elements that never came.


Sadly, the cool bits of forward thinking were matched by some clangers, The authors imagined a lateth century world where all the movie theatres were closing down out of disinterest, a world where photographic film was strictly rationed and no digital cameras were invented to pick up the slack which wouldnt have been a problem if it werent for the fact that the tachyon messenger was sending what amounted to digital images, a world where a woman being a housewife was expected by everyone everywhere, which leads me too.


The portrayal of women in this book annoyed me constantly, It wasnt that Benford not to mention his ghostly partner because he didnt, after all was misogynistic, I didnt sense any hatred of women in his writing, What was clearly present, however, was the cloistered attitude of an academic in a field that in the Eighties kept women firmly out of its ranks, It is the writing of a man out of touch with the changing social conventions of his day, which translated into an inability to foresee the way social conventions would be formed seventeen years later.
Benfords downfall is a lazy acceptance of patriarchy and a lack of imagination for past, present, and future gender roles,

The authors sickening defence of those three unassailable pillars of benevolence: England, the USA and the educated middle class, Puke, puke, puke.

Racism towards the whole of South America, with special attention given to Brazil and Argentina, The bulk of the ecological blame falls to Brazil for their destruction of the rainforests, but there is no mention, anywhere in the book, of the worldwide market forces that must motivate such destruction.


Pageof my copy which I received as a bookmooch are missing, It looks like someone took an Xacto knife to the page, and I am dying to know why and what the hell I am missing, If any of you have a copy of this book, I would appreciate a photocopy of the pages so I can read them and add them to my copy, I suppose its not a big deal, though, since the book was far from impressive,

Finally JFK survives! And there was definitely only one shooter, Whew. Lots of potential but never realized, Too wordy with unintelligable technical jargon, I hated the end, though it was probably more realistic than another

scenario,
This is the first and only time I ever threw a book in the garbage after reading it, I just couldn't inflict anyone I know with it, One of the earliest Hard science fiction novel that I have read, A mind blowing for a simple reader who just thought faster than light concept was it was moving very fast, A solid gold five star book in idea side,

I have read some of author's short stories, and failed read one of his Galactic Center novel, Even with all that negative experience, I could finish read this book, The plot and storytelling is slow, as if confirmed my low expectation before reading this book, But you should read this book because the idea, That's one reason I read SF novels, sitelink livejournal. com/

Written in, with storylines set inand, this is a scientists' sf novel, the futureworld facing ecological and social catastrophe and its physicists trying to communicate with their predecessors to prevent it from happening.


As a Cambridge NatSci graduate I loved the visceral detail of the decayingsetting, though Benford failed to predict one element of real life decay, the extinction of independent bookshops he still has Bowes and Bowes open and staffed by attractive young women, when in real life I think it closed in the earlys.


But it's a bit less satisfactory as a novel than I remembered it from my first reading, Both ends of the time line feature almost entirely male working environments, with the odd distant woman scientist collaborating but the protagonists enduring varyingly problematic sex lives with their various female partners.
I was not completely convinced, though I can see that it's written from the heart,

And the sendingmessagesthroughtime plot, the core of the book, actually doesn't work very well, Rather than the messages frominspiring scientific research to get the world out of the mess it is in, they accidentally prevent the assassination of John F, Kennedy, and that seems to be the crucial point of departure which kicks theworld out of our timeline and into a better one, Why Kennedy's survival should make the difference is not really explained, And the elaborate system developed by thescientists to check that their message is getting through is unnecessary given that their telephone system still works,

Though I do like the nod to Silverberg's Dying Inside, whose protagonist makes a brief appearance on page, This book has been called "hard science fiction" by some reviewers as a way to emphasize the accuracy of the author's hard science and to excuse the Timescape's problems as a novel.
I don't buy that. The word fiction still lies in the term "hard science fiction" and I'm holding this book to the standards for fiction,

By which standards this book fails miserably, The male characters are bland and wonky, like talking heads for the author's scientific theories, Each one has a few distinguishing quirks, but they are still the same typelab rats, I get that they're absorbed by their work, But do I really want to hear so much about their scientific theories and their day at the lab These scientists are not wellfleshed, distinct characters to me, They are ciphers and props and mouthpieces for the author's science, Or at least the males are, The females are considered best for something else,

Then there are the two time periods,and, The thenfuturesure felt like, I discerned little social difference between the two eras, no altered point of view or different customs for the people living in, The author distinguishesfromby sprinkling in pop culture references from thes like confetti, Let me guess. He did his historical research by reading old Life magazines, But in good scifi writing a different world is a different social environment, extended by the imagination, This Timescape'sis a stressedout world with advanced science, and it's circling extinction, We see, hear, or feel so little of it, It's like a stage setting in the background, rather than a richly believable world we can live in as readers,

But literary shortcomings are not this Timescape's greatest fault, Even for, the date of publication, this book presents stereotypes of women that are insidious and obnoxious, It could have been criticized as offensive then, The author parades the women like props who exist to serve and please their men, When we are introduced to these women, always through the eyes of men, they are overwhelmingly judged for their sexiness and their physical appearance, We learn they are good at cooking and good in bed, They do not appear to have opinions of their own, nor much interest in the greater world outside the home, Does any one of them have a real job

We meet the perfect housewife Marjorie, the pushy mother Mrs, Bernstein, the sexedup girlfriend Penny, the trophy wife Mitsuoko, the crazy old lady Heather's mother, and the bimbo Laura, Only one woman, the scientist Cathy, is an intellectual peer to the men and she actually works for a living, No surprise, she's described as physically unattractive thin and bony, with papery skin, and she tells us she is bisexual, Then she plays the part of the mannish lesbian, another destructive stereotype,

How did this book win the Nebula Award This book reminds me why science fiction is viewed as a genre, and not taken more seriously as literature, It reflects as badly on the award as it does on the author,

I borrowed this book from my public library, so I had to return it, If I had owned it, I could have had the pleasure of throwing this book in the trash, Where it belongs.
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