I used Flashforward as a palate-cleanser. A quick and easy read that wouldn’t be too hard to digest. Characters take a back seat to the plot and the big ideas. There’s some flaws, and it touches some hot-button issues of mine. However, like watching a Michael Bay movie, I didn’t expect too much so in the places it didn’t pull through, I didn’t care so much.
Deap in the heart of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, physicists are about the conduct the experiment which should create a Higgs boson, a previously mythical quark (I think it’s a quark…). But at precisely the moment the experiment should run, everyone blacks out
for 2 minutes and 21 seconds. More accurately, they experience a vision of themselves about 21 years in the future. But then it turns out it’s not just the people at CERN, but everyone in the world. Meanwhile, the cars they are driving and the planes they are landing don’t have anyone doing those things anymore, and they crash. Lots and lots of mayhem.
That’s the setup. The rest of the book looks at basically two things: philosophically, what’s your response if free will doesn’t exist? What appears to be free will is an illusion. The choices you make tomorrow are fixed. In 10 years, you will be a barista as Starbucks. You will
make that decision. You have made that decision. It is ummutable. What do you decide to do now? (Keeping in mind that that decision is already fixed.) It doesn’t matter what you do, because you will have already done it. On the other hand, you still have to experience that choice, and it appears to you in real time as if it’s a choice.
The plot basically revolves around who is responsible for all the catastrophes that occurred while everyone experienced their visions. Can CERN be blamed despite not knowing and having no way of knowing and indeed, if the future is pre-determined, being unable to make a different choice? Would you blame them? One physicist on the experiment has no vision, but other people’s visions say he is killed several days prior to time of everyone’s visions. So now he has a solve his own murder before he’s murdered kind of problem.
That’s the Robert J. Sawyer version of Michael Bay’s explosions. That’s the stuff that is fun and cool and all explodey.
The bad stuff. Really flat characters. Who breaks off a we need to talk
discussion with their significant other to argue physics with them instead? All of these characters are one dimensional.
The book also fails the Bechdel Test. Sawyer has multiple smart driven women in his cast of characters, so a reader may think they are more than window dressing. But no. Then they do all their relating to the men, rather than the physics or each other. Two women never have a conversation together in the book. They get to talk some physics with their significant others, but not each other. And every single female character ends up in bed with a man, while generally the men get to be around for stuff besides relationships.
If you’re the type of person who can watch Michael Bay movies without noticing that the plots make no sense, then you’ll be fine here. Basically fun entertainment, but I couldn’t bring myself to really enjoy it.
A few other blogged reviews:
Title: Flashforward
Author: Robert J. Sawyer
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: Paperback
Length: 319 p.
Publication date: 2009 (originally 1999)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2413-9
Subject: Higgs bosons — Fiction
Subject: Time travel — Fiction
LC classification: PR9199.3.S2533 F58 1999
Thanks for linking to me! Your review is interesting, and I like that you focused on the free will question! :)