Benford, Gregory. Timescape. NY: Bantam Spectra, 1996 (originally published in 1980 by Simon & Schuster). 412pp. $6.50 (paper). 79-27298. ISBN 0-553-29709-0. C.I.P.
It's 1998 and the world as we know it is rapidly falling apart. Plankton blooms many miles in diameter have begun to form in the oceans and can't be stopped, and sudden violent cases of food poisoning are becoming more frequent. It's clear the planet won't be able to sustain life much longer. Several physicists at Cambridge University, desperate to take some action, decide to attempt an outrageous thing: sending a message to the Earth of the early 1960s, by means of a tachyon beam aimed at the location in space where Earth then had been, describing the situation so that it might be averted. (Tachyons are presumed to travel no slower than the speed of light.) Another physicist and his graduate student are running some experiments in La Jolla, California, in 1962. What's supposed to be a steady-state low-temperature experiment is yielding data that eventually prove to be fragments of a coded message. But what happens to the world that sent the message, once the world that received it begins to understand how to prevent the plankton blooms from forming? If you succeed in sending a message that affects the past, what does that do to your present? Is it somehow superseded by the new present that arises from the knowledge you sent back? That's only one of the thought-provoking plot elements worked out in Timescape. You also learn about the sorts of negative synergistic effects that could happen in our environment (See N. Myers, Science 269, 358 (1995) for an engaging discussion of how we might deal with environmental problems not yet anticipated), as well as life in the physics lab (Benford teaches physics at the University of California, Irvine, and continues to write both novels and nonfiction, for example, last year's article in Reason on strategies for preventing global warming). This is all wrapped up in an absorbing story of real people trying to live their lives on the brink of the unknown—it's a novel you'll want to read again.—Jeff Cook, AAAS, Washington, DC
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