It's hard to believe that the person who wrote The Peace War also wrote Marooned in Realtime.

Actually, no, it isn't - that's just the dumb sort of comment that reviewers tend to say. Marooned in Realtime is a vast leap forward from The Peace War in terms of writing style, plotline and proficiency, which consequently means that it's pretty damned good. Here's a quick synopsis:

The Peace War took place in 2050. Since then, technology has progressed at such a startling rate that by the 2200's, people separated by a decade find it almost impossible to recognise each others computers or equipment. In other words, things are looking up. Then, sometime around 2250, the entirety of human civilisation both on Earth and throughout the Solar System just... disappeared, leaving empty cities and no records of why they moved on.

Seeing as Marooned in Realtime takes place after 2250, obviously some people were left behind or otherwise there wouldn't have been much of a story. These 'survivors' were all residing in bobbles during the period from 2220 to 2250 and in many cases, for much longer than that period. As you might think, they all entered their bobbles at different times and set them to pop at different times, so some come from as early as 2050 or as late as 2210, and emerged a few decades after the disappearence - or fifty million years later. This makes for an extremely interesting (and huge) disparity of technology and resources between the survivors.

One of the more teched-up group of survivors, two women called the Korolevs, decide that they want to try and re-establish civilisation and so spend a few million years jumping around from place to place rounding up bobbled individuals so they'll have enough people to start up a colony (they get 300 people - just enough genetic diversity for it to work). Unlike most of the other survivors, the Korolevs can do this since they had an inkling that something altogether weird might have happened to civilisation while they were bobbled up and conseqently took a fairly large amount of equipment with them, including the capability to generate their own bobbles.

On their last final jump to round up the last 100 people, one of the two Korolevs is pushed outside of the designated bobbling area for the people they've already gathered and so is... you guessed it... Marooned in Realtime!

[In case you're wondering why these ultra-high-tech Korolevs didn't think to bring along exowomb technology with them, they did. It broke.]

Before you say it, no, the story is not about the adventures of this person who is Marooned. As you discover from the first 50 or so pages, this unfortunate individual manages to survive on her own, with no technology, for several decades but eventually dies. The remaining Korolev puts a detective from 2100 called W. W. Brierson on the case of the murder. It turns out that Brierson didn't enter a bobble for a hundred thousand years just for fun - like some of the other survivors, he was 'shanghaied', or bobbled against his will.

Vinge really does show off his prodigious imagination in Marooned by extrapolating the use of the bobble technology from The Peace War. For example, many of the 'high-tech' survivors have fleets of spacecraft that can propel themselves to relativistic speeds by dropping a nuke behind them and bobbling up as it explodes, thus riding on the wave of the explosion. However, he reveals that staying bobbled up doesn't mean you can be invulnerable - you might bobble up to escape from an attacker, but your attacker could simply catch your bobble and drop it in the sun - when the bobble eventually pops, you're toast (the solution to this involves a highly-connected fleet of smaller subsidiary craft that bobble in and out quickly to defend the main bobble).

Stuff like this crops up regularly within Marooned, but even so it remains secondary to the strong plotline where our detective is trying to single out the murderer from among the three hundred humans who are left alive on Earth; this provides a good excuse for him to talk to some of the more eccentric high-techs (as only a high-tech could have had the equipment to subvert the Korolev's systems) and give the reader a great deal of fun. We also get to see some of the characters who were featured in The Peace War take part in the goings on in Marooned.

I don't want to give much of the plot away, but suffice to say that it's extremely compelling and Vinge really has thought out the implications of bobbles and super-high-technology. After all, Marooned is (to my knowledge) the first novel in which he introduces the concept of the Singularity. The idea behind the Singularity is that science and technology will continue to accelerate at exponential rates until it'll get to the point where we (at this moment in time) cannot possibly predict what life will be like - we'll have become so unimaginably powerful that the poor unenhanced Homo Sapiens brains we have now will not be able to comprehend the type of activities and thoughts we might have in just a hundred or two hundred years.

Possibly my favourite part of Marooned is towards the end, where Brierson interviews a 'survivor' who bobbled up in 2210 - the latest of all the survivors. The Korolevs bobbled up in 2200, and they don't have a clue how his spaceship works except for the fact that it's more powerful than their entire fleet and is made up of material a million times the density of lead. The survivors talks candidly about life in such an advanced society, and some of the incredibly ambitious projects humanity is toying with at the time - pure heaven for a SF fan like myself who enjoys a bit of hard science every so often, mixed in with more interesting stuff like bobbles.

[In case you're wondering why this 2210 guy isn't in charge what with his equipment, it's because he didn't enter his bobble entirely of his own will and so hadn't been able to prepare for any unforeseen nastiness when he emerged (e.g. the total collapse of civilisation), unlike the Korolevs.]

Marooned is a piece of true, Vinge-style space opera with just a few simple fundamental ideas that he extrapolates into incredible scenarios and universes. While it's not quite as polished as A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky, that fact shouldn't put you off reading Marooned in Realtime at all. A true classic.