Customer Reviews

The World at The End of Time

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A fairly decent book that is now out of print, this has to have some of the wilder science fiction ideas that I've seen in a novel thus far that are backed with actual science as opposed to pseudo-scientific babble. More ambitious than Ringworld, hey, anyone can make a giant metal doughnut, how about moving an entire solar system around and describing what the relativistic effects are going to do to the inhabitants? All right maybe it isn't especially innovative but it's darn entertaining. Basically there's an omniscient intelligence out there goofing around and basically causing most of the plot catalysts in the book. The actual plot concerns a group of colonists, especially Viktor (who is fairly cool and not all that flat a character, except for his rather disturbing obsession with an older woman, but he does get better by the end) who is there for the entire book and the effects that Wan-To (the intelligence) has on them. The funny part of this book is that the groups never meet each other, not to disappoint anybody who wants to read the book but if you're expecting some kind of long philosophical discussion between Wan-To and Viktor get that thought out of your head because it never happens. If you want something similar go read "Sailing Bright Eternity" by Gregory Benford which has a conversation along those lines. But you really don't miss it, Pohl gives us enough of a meaty plot to sink our teeth into and his extrapolations are fairly interesting. The only other gripe I have is that the book left an angle open for a sequel by being totally open ended but I can't see Mr Pohl resolving the ending in more than fifty pages. Maybe a short story is in the works for one day to tie up the loose ends? Maybe? All in all, highly entertaining thought provoking stuff for the scientist in you.

Frederik Pohl has succeeded and I consider this the finest piece of work I have yet to read of his.

One of the previous reviewers states that the characters are flat and impersonal. I don't agree. One of the primary characters is a star and therefore its thought process and motivations are bizarrely non-human but not flat. The other main character I found to be a view point character and filled this requirement perfectly.

Truly an awesome book and I recommend it with no reservations. For those of you interested in Frederik Pohl's works find out more at thoughtline.com. Thoughtline is debuting the first ever web page dedicated exclusively to Frederik Pohl in late Summer of 1999.

Of the 286 sci-fi books in my library, this has been the second most read

This is a great book and I loved it. It is not easy to get into and I admit, I skipped parts that got too technical. At times I thought I would never make it to the end. And several times when reading about Wan-to and the other beings I thought "so what?". But the end of this book is worth every word. It comes together. After all the sadness it ends with such hope and optimism that I just wanted to cry for joy. Life goes on. Human beings go on. Intelligence and hard work do prevail.

Reading this book today it seems as fresh as the day it was written. In describing the colonist squabble over religion Pohl even addresses the differences between the Sunnis and Shiities. In the beginning population growth is welcomed in the colony and women are encouraged to have babies by multiple partners. At another time when the population is forced underground growth is discouraged, even considered a crime. Four thousand years later, genetically perfect babies are created in the laboratory and delivered to their parents. Pohl anticipates gay partners raising hetrosexual children, and computer-delivered school lessons. He describes a shift from science as the preferred field of study to exhaultation of dance and the arts. Viktor (our everyman hero) is frozen and thawed 4 times in 4500 years. Each time a lot has happened to the human race. But through all this, humans survive and retain knowledge and civilization. The book comes full circle. It starts with the colonization of Newmanhome, and it ends with it. I love this book. I consider it one of the best books I ever read. I highly recommed it to anyone who loves science fiction and is worried about the future. Viktor will tell you whether you know what will happen, or understand what has happened, life goes on and it is worth living.

Indeed, aside from looking rather dumb, it hasn't much to do with the storyline. The science fiction in the book is very credible : I found the space travel, the mutations, the deep-freeze sleeps and the astrophysics very realistically depicted. What's more, the two main characters, although not very complex, are quite touching in their loneliness and you grow attached to them. Above all, giving such interstellar objects as stars a conscious life is an original and awesome idea.

An intriguing story of the perception of time, and how much of what we take for granted as truth could be no more certain than our geocentric beliefs from a few hundred years ago. This story is for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to see what humanity could become, and what we might learn, given the passage of thousands of years. In the meantime, we will probably fail at least as much as we will succeed, but there will be lessons in our triumphs and failures. A mere five thousand years ago, we were little more than intelligent primates. In another five thousand who knows what we could become? For anyone interested in exploring this idea, you've found the book.

There was a time when considering Life as we know it meant the habitable zone of a star, surface of a planet, liquid water. Only in the late twentieth century and early twenty first have we begun to consider things like Artificial Life, bootstraped by other forms of life. Or Life forms that emerge simply because their environments emerge from other life forms waste products, Oxygen breathers for example. In such a world we dream of the day when intelligent forms of Life emerge from the waste product of our collections of data or the Internet, that might rise up and organize or exceed our capabilities. Perhaps even the mere consistent availablity of purified silcon wafers will spawn a new form of Life under our very noses.

So why then should it seem far fetched that the surface or interior of a Star might not provide the perfect growth medium for a vast intelligence in control of energies and capabilities none of us could even fathom. Until this novel.

In dreaming up such a being, correction "beings" scattered throughout our galaxy and their motivations. And yet still finding a way to relate their god like actions to humanity, to pull them down from the heavens and propose that they might have something to learn from and in common with humanity. This book pulls off a magnificent feat of magic.

It spans huge swaths of time, worlds and even introduces demi-gods of a sort that may understand humantiy better than itself, and their makers.

I hope that teases your interest in this story, its a good one.

My only regret is it seems to stop just short of engaging the principals in a show down you know is coming. The stage is set the dance hall is rented.. but the final act is never begun. That waits for a far off day when the author concludes this story.

I once shared an email with Frederik Phol about this story and whether he fore saw a day when it would be followed by a sequel, to which he said he was far too busy with other stories and threads to consider it at that time. I hope he does find the time, someday.

I remember this book from when I was in high school. At the time, I didn't get a lot of the references to astronomical distances, theory of relativity, etc. But the concept of the book stuck with me into my 30's and I finally located this copy of it. The ideas are still fresh, even 20 years later. The story is excellent and doesn't get bogged down with unnecessary prose. The idea that a plasmoid, ultra-powerful being could come into existence, develop, and evolve alongside mankind without our knowledge of it, including a man trapped in a solar system moving near the speed of light to live for hundreds of billions of years makes this a story that will blow your mind and get you to read it at least twice. I read it in 1990, again this year, and after giving my brain a break, I will read it at least once in 2011. Maybe I will slow down and really try to digest the scientific implications and creativity in this book. Pohl really shines in this book!

I've been a fan of Fred Pohl since The Space Merchants in 1952 and I had assumed I had read, over the years, every novel (and most short stories) he ever published -- but somehow I seem to have missed this one. There are two main characters here, one human, the other very much not, but both of them extraordinarily long-lived -- again, one in the normal course of things, the other as a result of screwing around with relativistic effects. Viktor Sorricaine is the son of an astrophysicist whose family has joined a colony ship headed for a virgin planet half a dozen light years from Earth -- which involves most of the passengers spending most of their time in cryogenic storage, so when the twelve-year-old Viktor finally reaches his new home (called Newmanhome), he's 115 in ship-years. And he doesn't know it yet but large parts of the rest of his existence also are going to be spent as a corpsicle. The other protagonist (if one may call him that) is Wan-To, a plasma being who reached consciousness ("born" doesn't describe it at all) when the universe was only a couple billion years old and who, by the time you reach the end of the book, will have existed for more than ten-to-the-fortieth years, most of it spent comfortably and solitarily inside one or another star. Personal security is the most important facet of Wan-To's existence, in pursuit of which he is constantly at odds even with those beings like himself whom he had earlier created for companionship. One gambit he tries involves sending a number of small star groupings off in random directions at very high velocity, as a sort of decoy; his rivals/offspring, he hopes, will take potshots at the supposed escapees, allowing him to draw a bead on their own locations. It works, too. Unfortunately, one of the decoys is Newmanhome and its nearby stars, and much of the energy required to push it up to relativistic velocity is drained from the system's own star. Which makes the previously Earthlike planet an increasingly cold place indeed. Viktor becomes a sort of time traveler, coming out of his enforced deep-freeze at long intervals, losing his family and friends to the distant past more than once, but even though he's rather self-centered and egoistic, he does finally begin to grow up, and things will eventually work out -- maybe. It's a good yarn, with Pohl's usual tongue-in-cheek attitude toward his characters and their problems, and a humane attitude toward the human race generally. He gets in more than a few good licks at religious fanaticism this time, too. And hard-science geeks will find lots and lots of fascinating discussions of speculative physics. Recommended.

As far as the `fiction' part goes, the characters are well developed and the story-line is nothing short of brilliant. As far as the `science' goes, it is extremely real - and none of that `how the heck is this even possible' stuff that puts off a great number of readers. Of course, one has to accept the possibility of `Wan-To' - the greatest intelligence in the universe.

As per the excerpt from the back of the book:

"Wan-To was the oldest and most powerful intelligence in the Universe, a being who played with star systems as a child plays with marbles. Matter occupied so tiny a part of his vast awareness that humans were utterly beneath his notice...."

Once one accepts the basic possibility of a being such as Wan-To, the story is a lot more believable. Wan-To's personality grows on the reader - inspite of the fact that Wan-To destroys several humans unwittingly - simply because he doesn't understand our simple carbon life-form or what possible use to the universe we could possibly be. All this destruction is totally un-intentional - and more along the lines of a human swatting a cockroach (or more realistically - a bug that one doesn't recognize - but squashes anyway just to be safe).

Caught between Wan-To's games is a human named Viktor Sorricaine - who lives for a very long time indeed thanks to being frozen (cryogenically) and unfrozen several times throughout his life. He desperately tries to understand what could be causing the bizarre astrophysics that results as a consequence of Wan-To's playful games with stars. In this intellectual pursuit, he finds himself quite alone - since humans have achieved such technological mastery in the future, that they pretty much stop trying to figure out the `why something happened' several millennia ago. Their 'practical' know-how is so advanced that they do not see anything to be gained by the 'theoretical' understanding of a subject such as astrophysics.

Our protaganist, Viktor, respectfully disagrees - and continues to search for an answer.
All-in-all - a fascinating story - with extremely well developed characters - and some amazing astrophysics explained fairly well.