Timescape

Rating:
Summary: Good idea, but a little boring
Review: The idea of the book is very good and it could have been a great novel in the style of John Brunner's "Sheep look up", also because the physics behind the tachyon-time-travel-idea are treated quite professionel during the whole book. But there a quite a lot of chapters where nothing happens and which seem to have little to do with the story, so the book gets boring sometimes. So if you skip all these chapters, you're going to read and interesting time-travel book!

Rating:
Summary: A decent exploration of time communication
Review: Perhaps if it had been half as long, the book would have been twice as good.

For anybody who complains that Science Fiction struggles to gain respect because of poor development of characters, I offer this book. The characters are uninteresting and actually take away from some of the Physics ideas and concepts of this book. I suppose we were supposed to relate to the human side of this story, but that could have been done quite as well and with about 100 pages or so less.

Perhaps the inside dealings of the characters' every day lives was done purposely. For the science in this sci-fi book was wonderful and the idea was great. So much so that the inclusion of the meanderings of the characters every day lives served as filler which in turn acted as a form of building suspense.

My recommendation...read the book, but skip over certain sections. They don't add to the book, but on the other hand they don't take away from it either. Otherwise its a good sci-fi offering.

Let the tachyons flow.

Rating:
Summary: Best Book I've Read This Year
Review: The plot is very intelligent and full of real life facts blended into fiction. It is also not pure sci-fi in that you can really relate to the main characters in the novel. All in all, a great book and one well worth reading

Rating:
Summary: How did this win the Nebula Award?
Review: Good concept, but half the book could have been removed and it would be just as good. The story is cluttered with dinner parties, trivial family matters, and ralationships that are of no interest.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best time-oriented science fiction novels ever.
Review: Timescape does what most time-centered science fiction novels do not; it explores the nature of time without actual time travel. Each time I hear a character on Star Trek mention "tachyons" I think back to this entertaining, compelling and suspenseful novel that provides a sufficient warning for mankind and how he treats his environment. Despite the technical focus on time and faster-than-light particles, Timescape is easily understandable and enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: Absorbing, intelligent, gripping time-travel novel
Review: There are no weird aliens or laser blasters in Gregory Benford's brilliant work of science fiction. Instead, what we have here is a story of physicists at opposite ends of a time tunnel (reminiscent of the tunnel technology we use to secure Internet communications today). From this dry base, with these dull-sounding characters, Benford has created a story which is so absorbing that the reader is hard pressed to put it down all the way to the terrific ending. As the ultimate test, I lent the book to my wife (no science fiction reader) while we were on vacation. She would not put the book down until she had finished it

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Story, Tough Reading
Review: This is an excellent book with a great story concept of reaching into out past. However, it does go off on tangents of serious science. I wouldn't recommend it for people who don't know anything about Quantium Mechanics or Physics. On a whole though, a very good book

Rating:
Summary: I wanted at least a B- in Physics!
Review: I didn't read Professor Benford's book, but I'm rating it a 7.9/10 just because he gave me a C+ in Physics at UC Irvine. But I'm biased, so don't take my review seriously. I'm sure "Timescape" is a good book

Rating:
Summary: brilliant character development, great prose, sophisticated
Review: When someone once said to me, with his nose high in the air, "I don't read science fiction, I read literature," I gave him this book. He was forced to eat his words. Timescape, is sophisticated, with brilliant character development, a great hook, and excellent prose throughout. Its probably the best portrayal of a scientist that I ever read. Don't put off reading this book just because you'd prefer a lighter fare. 40 pages into the novel and you're hooked

Rating:
Summary: Superb!
Review: Benford is one of the few SciFi writers that gives insight into how scientists really think and work. Timescape blends Benford's near-future ecological disaster with the coming-of-age of a young scientist some 30 years earlier via quantum mechanical cross-time communication. More than just great SciFi, this is great Fiction in its own right, with rich character development and a thought-provoking/mind-bending plot set in both the future and the past.