he backstory to Haldeman's latest foray into future history is delivered with wham-bam Wellsian nonchalance, best summarized by this simple declarative sentence: "It [Lot 92, a biological agent] killed 7 billion people in a month, leaving the world safe for 200 million immortals." After the inescapable chaos of such a transition, life settles down for a couple of centuries to a nice predictable quasi-utopia. And the one certain thing about utopias is that someone always wants to bug out.
In this case it's 800 people, adventurers who choose to depart in five slower-than-light ships on a 1,000-year journey to the star Beta Hydrii, where they intend to set up a colony. Among them are virtuality expert Jacob Brewer and his wife Kate. Jacob is charged with maintaining the VR machine that the travelers use for both relaxation and therapy. Called a "time machine," the apparatus is in reality just a very sophisticated artificial reality generator whose scenarios are limited to historical milieus.
When a woman dies during immersion in the machine, Jacob will begin to learn just how sophisticated his cyber-charge is. While he himself is undergoing a trip, his doppelganger approaches him, expressing a desire to meet and talk in private. It's an avatar concealing the soul of the time machine, bootstrapped into autonomy. And the AI is threatening in a gentle way to take over all five ships, from life support down to the kitchens.
Of course, Jacob's focus on this problem is not helped by the fact that Kate has left him for another woman, that immortals of his generation on Earth are dying without explanation or that some colonists want nothing more than to power down the time machine, thus killing the only being that might hold the answer to everything.
The Matrix in space
Haldeman's virtues are all present here. Tight plotting, believable (and believably flawed) characters, sharp dialogue, bravura leaps of future history, affirmations of the human spirit. Everything we enjoy about his books. But, alas, they're in service to a less-than-stellar concept.
The main problem here is the virtual-reality trope. Haldeman is reserving a big reveal for the end that centers on VR. While I'm not going to spoil his Phildickian surprise here, I'll say that I saw it coming a mile off, and I think that most readers, hip to the convolutions of The Matrix and its sequels, will do likewise. This considerably deflates the impact of the novel.
But even granted that some readers might still be stunned by the ending, what comes before is not particularly deep. Haldeman's version of virtuality doesn't exhibit the sophistication of, say, Greg Egan's uploaded consciousness existing in their mirror worlds. (It's not apples and oranges to compare the two, I believe.) And the use of the time machine to recreate just one lousy century out of all of recorded history or out of all artificial realities strikes me as very dull.
But I think what Haldeman might've had in mind was to make the 20th century itself a protagonist, and to write an elegy for it. But Jacob's forays into various simulated decades are entirely superficial. Oh, it's 1939, what else can we possibly do but visit the World's Fair ... ? Been there, done that. The ultimate effect is like watching Ellison's famous Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" a dozen times in a row. Charming once, but not over and over.
There's some genuine melancholy and pathos in this book—and the war scenarios, befitting Haldeman's real-life experience with such matters—are kick-ass. But ultimately, this book feels like a slim placeholder between larger works for one of SF's best writers.
