Timescape

Timescape is science fiction in the very literal sense of being fiction about the activity of science, as well as in the usual speculative sense. Most of the book follows the lives of researchers and their associates in Cambridge in 1998 or La Jolla in 1962-3. When the book was published in 1980 these were equally distant in the future and the past.

The actual proper SF part of the tale is that the future scientists are trying to communicate with the past using tachyons, in order to avert or at least help mitigate the growing environmental crisis of 1998.

And somewhat to my surprise, that really is pretty much it. We're told that's what they're doing right at the start, and then we watch them do it for four hundred pages. I was constantly expecting some kind of extra complication, like another message being received from the further future, or somesuch, but apart from some speculation about pocket universes, there was nothing like that.

It's a good thing the rest of the book, following the characters in their respective worlds, was still pretty decent.

An enjoyable book, with a surprising lack of surprises. 3.5/5.