Rating: 
Summary: Very clever -- Sawyer's best yet.
Review: Lacking his usual Canadian content, but otherwise everything you expect from a Robert Sawyer novel: clever extrapolation, great ideas, good characters, and that old time sensawunder.
Rating:
Summary: A marvelous book.
Review: PUBLISHERS WEEKLY gave FLASHFORWARD its highest honour, a starred review (indicating a book of exceptional merit). PUBLISHERS WEEKLY's reviewer called FLASHFORWARD "soul-searching; a creative, exploration of fate, free will, and the nature of the universe. Using a third-person omniscient narrator, Sawyer shifts seamlessly among the perspectives of his many characters, anchoring the story in small details. This first-rate, philosophical journey, a terrific example of idea-driven SF, should have wide appeal." The store I work at received a galley, and I can only say that I agree. This is a marvelous book.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating premise marred by writing style
Review: Sawyer has done some truly wonderful books. "Starplex" and "Factoring Humanity" have secure places in my permanent collection. His work, however, has always had bits of what I term "arrogant liberalism" acting as anti-grace notes to the story, and this one is the worst yet. Example: "And Canadians didn't like guns, either - they had no Second Amendment, or whatever damned thing it was that made Americans think they could go around armed." The product of the most profound thinkers on society and politics Earth has ever produced is airily dismissed. The book is studded with similar passages, and eventually they get on the nerves. I gave up after chapter 17 of the bound galley I read. Even the fascinating question of whether scientific foreknowledge precludes free will couldn't keep me in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great idea, horrific result
Review: The main character had 2 main turning points in his life. One was done in summary. The last one -- the big one -- took place "on screen" but the author *would not tell us what happened*! I was so angry I wanted to throw the book out the window. I thought only beginning (unpublished) writers pulled that sort of trick on the reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Fundamentally flawed
Review: Flashforward aspires to be hard science fiction. Hard SF has one requirement above all others -- the science MUST be internally consistent. Sawyer's novel fails that test.
The premise is interesting. For reasons unknown (at the start of the book), everyone on Earth experiences a "flashforward" of themselves, 10 years later. Everyone, that is, except for an unlucky few people, including our protagonist, because in 10 years, they will be dead.
Or will they? The book's fundamental question is whether the future just experienced is inevitable, or subject to change. Was the world of 10 years hence a world that had, 10 years earlier, experienced a "flashforward"? Or was it a hypothetical world that would have been, if flashforward had not occurred?
In the course of the book, Sawyer squarely answers these questions. But the book's climactic scene, which deals with our protagonist's efforts to escape his inevitable(?) death, rests on a premise that cannot be reconciled with Sawyer's answer. Sawyer is guilty of sloppy thinking, or sloppy writing.
Rating:
Summary: "Flash" in the pan
Review: The book starts out compellingly when a science experiment intended to recreate conditions present moments after the Big Bang (of course I didn't actually understand this) instead causes everybody on Earth to glimpse 21 years into the future for two minutes. This produces major physical, psychological and political repercussions on a global level. But the scientist who ran the experiment, Lloyd, only seems to feel a passing guilt for causing mass tragedy (death and destruction from accidents that took place when everyone lost consciousness; people suicidal over their futures). There's not a lot of introspection into his lack of guilt, or, conversely, any investigation into the god complex he would likely get sucked into. Instead, he's inordinately worried about whether or not he should marry his fiancee given that he saw himself with someone else in 20 years.
Much of the rest of the book similarly focuses on the mundane concerns of the not-very-interesting protagonists and fringe players: Lloyd's partner Theo becomes obsessed with preventing his murder that's 21 years away -- while that's not mundane, it's not that interesting to anyone except Theo; another scientist is just happy to learn that in two decades he gets laid -- this doesn't bring comic relief to the story, and just undercuts any grander implications. Speaking of grander implications -- there aren't many. There's no true, visceral emotion to the book, and no sense that anybody has learned anything. And ~~~~~ SPOILER AHEAD ~~~~~ the fact that Lloyd actually wants to be immortal, floating in a robo-body above the Earth, watching it disintegrate, doomed to hover around the cosmos for eternity while just about everyone else has been dead for millions of years, sounds like an unthinkable horror rather than a euphoric fantasy.
Rating:
Summary: Great characters, compelling story!
Review: This is about the sixth Sawyer book I have read and like the other five, it delivers! Sawyer has a way of making highly likable characters and weaving in high tech science in terms that any layman can understand.
Lloyd and Theo are scientists performing at an experiment CERN to prove a long held scientific theory. Unknown to the scientist, the earth is being bombarded by a neutrino blast, remnants of a star that went nova, at the same time they are doing their experiment. The combination of the two conditions causes the entire world population to black out and have their minds shift 20 years into the future. Each person can observe their future self for about 2 minutes, and then are shifted back to their present day self.
This creates a whole slew of problems. Many people (probably millions world-wide) in the present time die during this experiment because they blacked out while driving a car or climbing stairs or while having an operation. One of the people killed is a young daughter of Lloyd's fiancee (she was hit by an out of control car). This creates a big moral issue for Lloyd, who also has to deal with the fact that in his own glimpse of the future he is married to a woman who is not his present day fiancee.
Theo had no glimpse of the future, which means that in 20 years he will be dead. Theo later learns that he will be murdered one day prior to that future date because many people saw his obituary during their glimpse. This causes Theo to investigate who would want to kill him 20 years hence.
The whole story tries to answer the question as to whether the future is fixed or do we have free choice to make our future? Is the future that was glimpsed the only possible future, or is it one of many possible futures based on the choices we can make?
The ending of the book is a slight letdown but you will get to it so fast (the book is hard to put down) that it doesn't really matter.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-Provoking Read
Review: Robert J Sawyer again delivers a great story. The best kind of science fiction, the "What If?" In this novel he raises the question: What if the consciousness of everyone on Earth was suddenly twenty years in the future and everyone glimpsed their future lives for two minutes? The ramifications are staggering from a psychological perspective. Is everything pre-determined or do we have free will?
As in Sawyer's other novels, the characters discuss all the scientific theories and ramifications of this accident in great detail that frankly will go right over the head of some readers. (My friend found these parts mind-numbingly boring) Boring or not, I am really surprised at the extent and length of the griping other reviewers have done over the viability of the science. It's FICTION! This is not a textbook or instruction manual.
Rating:
Summary: Living your life on "Hold"
Review: Classic science fiction. "What if" one thing were different -- how would that change everything else? A very interesting book, well written. It takes place at CERN (the world's main particle physics lab, in Europe) and uses the Large Hadron Collider (which is being built). For me, it's gratifying that Canada's existence, geography, and scientific contributions are acknowledged. The book starts in 2009; and I particularly liked the throwaway line that Stephen Lewis* was now Secretary General of the U.N. In this book, an experiment gives everyone in the world a glimpse of their future. They don't know what it means. If it's a moment of nothing, does that mean they're inevitably going to die before the future moment? Is their future written in stone or merely in clay? Would you dare to fall in love? This book explores the psychological effects of that future glimpse -- and of the devastation caused by everyone on Earth losing consciousness for a minute -- on several main characters. One of the realistic things about Sawyer's writing is that the characters are not superheroes -- they are pretty good people, with weaknesses. So they're not instantly likeable, and we might not identify with their every thought. But they do have thoughts and weight how to do what is right. So-o-o Canadian. (*Mr. Lewis is former leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party and former ambassador from Canada to the U.N. He has recently been involved in investigating the genocide in Rwanda and looking at ways to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa.) [This review was copied from my review on the BookCrossing Web site.]
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