Marooned in Realtime
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Cover of first edition (hardcover)
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| Author | Vernor Vinge |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Thomas Kidd |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Across Realtime |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher |
Bluejay Books/ St. Martin's Press |
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Publication date
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September 1986 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 270 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 13920425 |
| Preceded by | "The Ungoverned", (1985) |
Marooned in Realtime is a 1986 murder mystery and time-travel science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge, about a small, time-displaced group of people who may be the only survivors of a technological singularity or alien invasion. It is the sequel to the novel The Peace War (1984) and the novella The Ungoverned (1985). Both novels and the novella were collected in Across Realtime.
Marooned in Realtime won the Prometheus Award in 1987 and was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel that same year.
In the story, a device exists which can create a "bobble", a spherical stasis field in which time stands still for a specified length of outside time, allowing one-way time travel into the future. The bobble can also be used as a weapon, a shield against other weapons, for storage, for space travel (combined with nuclear pulse propulsion), and other purposes.
People whose bobbles burst after a certain date in the 23rd century find the Earth completely devoid of human life, with only ambiguous clues as to the cause; possibilities include alien attack and humanity transcending to a new level of existence as a result of a technological singularity. The "low-techs" — those who bobbled earlier — have roughly late-21st-century technology. The "high-techs" — those who had the advantage of ever accelerating progress — have vastly superior technology, including cybernetic enhancements, faster and thought-controlled bobblers, personal automaton extensions of self, space ships, medical technology to allow practical immortality (barring accidents or fatal injuries), and individual arsenals greater than those of entire 20th century countries. Of the high-techs, even those who bobbled at slightly different times have significantly different technology levels.
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