One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.
The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside--more than a …
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.
The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside--more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.
Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.
Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun--and report back on what they find.
Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
Interesting book - aliens (who never reveal themselves) cover the Earth in something that stops the view of space from the ground and makes time pass much more slowly on Earth than the rest of the Universe. The book follows two siblings from a rich and influential family and their childhood friend.
A Big Dumb Object has put the earth on a delay - each year inside equals a hundred million years outside.
You'd imagine this would make the tale somehow more brisk in its telling. Instead we focus on Elon Musk's best friend and accompain his excruciatingly long and boring life for an excruciatingly long and boring time, while Elon Musk attempts to rescue earth.
Correction: this is an idealized Elon Musk - a sexless, humorless creature that only cares about playing chess with aliens, instead of the meme-loving car salesman we have in our non-fictional world.
It's the neoliberal approach to crisis management: in case of apocalypse, trust the richest, most tech-savvy person with all your resources and defend them to the death from the evil fanatics, the government and the media, while you yourself just focus on living your life the exact same way you've been doing.
Far out concept. I found the interleaving of time throughout the book to be well done, but not exceptional.
This was a re-read for me as I finally had a decent ebook version. It remains as impressive as it was the first time. Big ideas grounded in a human story, that while straightforward, provides the contrast that the big canvas sci-fi ideas can play out against. Now for the rest of the trilogy.
