Marooned in Realtime (Vinge, Vernor) 1986

Another pleasure of reading books 22 years after they were published: page 162 of the paperback (2003 printing?) states:

He glanced at his mail. [...] The other items were from Yelen: megabytes of analysis on the party.

Oooh, really? Whole *megabytes* of analysis? Vinge is otherwise fairly careful to make his references to technology vague or fantastic/magical enough so that this particular slip jumps out and demands to be kindly giggled at from our terabyte-desktop-hard drive world. The novel is an interesting extrapolation of events from the Peace War, with references to some of our favorite characters (mention of Paul Hoehler/Naismith is notably absent) and a full *three* of them make appearances, and it's the last one that's a little weak, but sadly crucial to Vinge's construction of the novel. Also, while structured as a murder investigation, the novel unfortunately fails as a mystery because there simply aren't enough clues revealed to the reader for us to have anything more than vague guesses as to what's going on. There's nothing more frustrating than important information being hidden from us by the "Wil found what he was looking for, and I'm not gonna say what it was" technique. Overall it's still a good read, with some very well written passages when Vinge is making an effort to write his characters as if they're from a potential earth future, and not from the mid-80's.