Came in time promised and in condition promised. Haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list!

I didn’t hate it…. but I surely wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

The author put a kid in the book (7 year old) now I have no problem with kids in my book, if they act like kids. The author had this kid saying ridicules things that a 7 year old would never say.

Also he tried way to hard for a love story that FAILED miserably. When two characters in the story touched hands (guy and girl mind you) he actually describe the seconds their hands were touching as delicious …. PUKE!

I give it two stars because he got right to the flash-forward.

I really hope the TV show is better than this book.

I’ll be brief:

This is the first Robert J. Sawyer book I’ve read. Very disappointing. The prose was turgid and dull, bloated and repetitive. (The dialogue reads at times like a transcription of boring conversation.) The characters, cardboard. (They’re both inconsistent and unbelievable.) The editing, practically non-existent. (Typos galore, but also changing pronouns, misspelled words.) The plot, unconvincing. (And ultimately unexciting. In the end he tries to play a game similar to Greg Bear’s Blood Music. It doesn’t work.) The science, uninspiring. (He name-drops scientists, other science fiction writers, and other science fiction writers’ ideas.)

I came to the book really wanting to like it. I left the book feeling like I’d wasted my time.

I don’t think I’ll be venturing Sawyer’s way again, unfortunately.

This was the kind of book, that you had to really concentrate on to understand what is going on. I found that i had to go back every now and then to keep up with the character. Good reading and a good book to take with you on a long flight or sitting in a waiting room.

A lot attempted but with little results. I kept looking for the footnotes and perhaps some math formulas. It seems many Sci-fi writers are creating new genre’s these days. The discipline of the old Sci-fi is a thing of the past. But back to the attempts: good arguments of whether mankind has or hasn’t free will; a leap into the mythical arena of tachyons (energy moving faster than light); a great metaphor of the Minkowski time cube and thereby to explain the nature of time!; a primer on subatomic particle accelerators and their future obsolescence; a hint at the nature of time travel (although for less than 2 minutes). Not a small helping on Sawyer’s platter.

Unfortunately the author does not take his own web site advice in writing “to show instead of tell”. Unmotivated characters spouted large helpings of real-life physicist Frank Tipler’s Omega Point stuffing and I doubt the author got Tipler’s permission to reproduce. Sawyer could have at least dedicated the book to Tipler or added him to the acknowledgements. My biggest problem with the script was too much mixing of real life physicist’s theorizing with Sawyer’s own fine speculative fiction. Such a technique seems to fling the reader out of the imaginative walls in which the story is supposed to be taking place. One could argue that it shores up the believability of the story but the author should rather rely on the readers “suspension of disbelief.”