Gregory Benford

Detecting strange patterns of interference in a lab experiment, Gordon Bernstein, an assistant researcher at a California university, investigates and begins to uncover something that will change his life forever. Reprint. Nebula Award winner.

Timescape

Gavin

Amazing as formal experiment - how much physics detail (and physicist detail) can you put in a novel before it falls over? Lots of the pettiness, the indeterminate frustration, and the glory of academic life. A patchwork of details though - but if you like either physics or telling minutiae then you'll like this. The core plot device, communication backwards through time, is a direct consequence of taking the Wheeler-Feynman interpretation literally.

Benford is also extremely acute about both Californian and English vice.

  Perhaps that was the difference between merely thinking about experiments and actually having to do them. It must be harder to believe in serene mathematical beauties when you have dirty hands.


Grad student maxims:

  Mother nature is a bitch.
The probability of a given event is inversely proportional to its desirability.
One fudged curve is worth a thousand weasel words.
No analysis is a complete failure - it can always serve as a bad example;
Experience varies directly with the amount of equipment ruined.



  Gordon savored the clammy fullness of the breeze that had tunneled its way up from the Potomac... a welcome relief from California's monotonous excellence.



  
    

  

Britain's degradation is depicted in terms of particular institutions:

  The newsagent's a door down proclaimed on a chalkboard the dreadful news that the Times Literary Supplement had gone belly-up.


The relationships - highly conventional, highly nuclear - are odd, but feel real because of all the little jokes, gestures, and support they have, and which life has.

  "God damn, I love you," he said, suddenly grinning. Her smile took on a wry cast. Beneath the flickering street lights she kept her eyes intently on the road, "That's the trouble with going domestic. You move in with a man and pretty soon, when he says he loves you, you hear underneath it that he's thanking you."


And I can forgive a lot of a C20th novel if it disses Freud:
He had oscillated in mood through 1967, not buying Penny's Freud-steeped recipes for repair... "Isn't it a little obvious to be so hostile to analysis?" she said once... he felt the clanky, machinelike language was a betrayal, a trap. Psychology had modeled itself after the hard sciences... but they had taken Newtonian clockwork as their example... His intutition told him that no such exterior analysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them.

The slowly growing apocalypse (though global) is mostly discussed by characters in Britain, so we get a highly amusing contrast between California (1963, pre-apocalypse) and Cambridge (1998, during), where the Americans are all clean and hopeful and the Brits slowly starving and fishing in sewers:

  Mercury glowed as if alive beneath the filmed water. It gave off a warm, smudged glitter, a thin trapped snake worth a hundred guineas. "A find! A find!" Johnny chanted... They queued up to turn in their pint of the silvery stuff to the Hunt Facilitator. In line with current theory, Renfrew noted, social groupings were now facilitated, not led.


The best subplot is probably the reptilian Oxbridge chad reverting to a heavily-armed feudal lord, including harem husbandry, as society breaks down. 

  Peterson calculated that quite enough had been done along the lines of intimidate-the-visitor and decided a gesture of indifference was needed. "Do you mind if I smoke?"


Never mind the tachyons; there's some truly far-out notions in this, e.g.

  Queen Elizabeth had abdicated in favor of her eldest son the previous Christmas and he had chosen to be crowned on his fiftieth birthday, in November.


And indeed reality reasserts itself in the face of this rank authorial whimsy:

  "Did you hear about the Coronation? They've cancelled preparations [owing to the total breakdown of law and order]."



I wonder if the ending - the triumph and social ascent of the man who just receives the future signals; the literal fading-away of the team that built the theory and transmitter in conditions of terrible scarcity - is a jab at someone in particular. Here's Renfrew's last word - after succeeding, but never knowing that he has:

  He was trying a modification of the signal correlator when the lights winked out. Utter blackness rushed in. The distant generator rattled and chugged into silence. It took a long time to feel his way out and into the light. It was a bleak, gray noon, but he did not notice; it was enough to be outside. He could hear no sound from Cambridge at all. The breeze carried a sour tang. No birds. No aircraft. He walked south, towards Grantchester. He look back once at the low square profile of the Cav and in the diffused light he raised a hand to it. He thought of nested universes, onion skin within onion skin... For so long now he had been transfixed by the past. It had deadened him this real world around him. He knew, now, without knowing quite how he knew, that it was forever lost... Rather than feeling despair, he was elated, free. Marjorie lay up ahead, no doubt frightened to be alone. He remembered her preserves on the uncompromising straight shelving, and smiled. They could eat those for some time. Have some easy meals together, as they did in the days before the children. There was really quite a lot ahead to do, when you thought about it.



About a third too long; I honestly think I could edit out a hundred pages and get a great book. Maybe this is 4* even so.

Timescape

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