Flashforward is a science fiction novel by Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer. It was first published in 1999. Although the copyright page, title page, spine, and back cover all identify the book as Flashforward, the front cover styles the title as two words, Flash Forward.

The novel revolves around events in the year 2009. At CERN the Large Hadron Collider accelerator is performing a run to search for the Higgs boson. During the run the entire human race loses its consciousness of the present and experiences events from about 21 years in the future. Each individual, except for those asleep, experiences their own future through the senses of their future self. This "flashforward" lasts a matter of two minutes, but when it is over many are dead in accidents involving vehicles, aircraft, and any other device needing human control.

Plot summary

The protagonist is Lloyd Simcoe, a 47 year old Canadian particle physicist. He works with his fiancée Michiko, who has a daughter, Tamiko. Another researcher and friend is Theo Procopides.

The fallout from the flashforward occupies much of the first part of the book. The consequences include the death of Michiko's daughter as an out-of-control vehicle plows into her school. Oddly, no recording devices anywhere in the world functioned in the present during the event. Security camera tapes show noise and even recording devices in television studios show nothing until the event is over. This is interpreted as proof of the observer effect in quantum theory. With the awareness of the entire human race absent, "reality" went into a state of indeterminacy. When the awareness returned, reality collapsed into its most likely configuration, which was one in which moving objects had careened out of control in the direction they were already headed.

The deaths of several characters are forecast by the "flashforward". Anyone who did not experience it is assumed to be dead in the future. This includes Theo Procopides. Some people report reading about his murder in the future. However as time goes by it seems that the events of the future are not predestined. Some people, depressed by their visions of their own dismal futures, commit suicide, thereby changing those futures. The story begins to take on the features of a murder mystery, as Theo attempts to prevent his own murder. His brother Dimitrios, who aspired to be a writer but saw himself just working in a restaurant in the future, is one of the suicides.

At CERN, the scientists plan a repeat of the run, but this time warning the world of the exact time, so that preparations can be made. However, there is no "flashforward", but the LHC does find the Higgs boson.

One of the consequences of the event is that Simcoe is approached by a billionaire who is researching practical immortality. He is offered an opportunity to benefit from this himself.

He is considering this when the riddle of the "flashforward" is solved. At the same time as the LHC was running, a pulse of neutrinos arrived from the remnant of supernova 1987A. The remnant is not a neutron star, but a quark star, a superdense body of strange matter. Starquakes cause it to emit a neutrino pulse at unpredictable intervals. As the date at the other end of the "flashforward" approaches, a satellite is launched into an orbit close to that of Pluto, from where it can give several hours warning of another neutrino pulse arriving. The neutrinos travel slower than light, since they have mass, and thus a radio message from the satellite will arrive at Earth before the neutrinos do. The intent is to run the LHC again and create another "flashforward".

Theo Procopides, meanwhile, discovers a religious fanatic attempting to sabotage the experiment. In a chase sequence through the tunnels containing the LHC equipment, he is able to stop this, preventing his own murder in the process.

It turns out that the neutrino pulse arrives on the exact day which everyone experienced during the original event. The world stops and rests at the appointed time, but this time nobody experiences anything, except for a few. Simcoe experiences a vision of himself moving through time for billions of years, his consciousness existing in different artificial bodies, presumably supplied by the immortality researchers. He is aware of the billionaire being with him in some of these situations.

When the event is over, there is general puzzlement over why nothing happened. Simcoe comes to realize that the effect connects two periods of quantum disturbance occurring within the lifetimes of the individuals involved. Since there will be no more events in the lifetimes of any living people, nobody experience a "flashforward", except for those, like himself, who are secretly associated with the immortality project. However, he decides to change the future yet again and refuses the treatment.

Themes

The author presents themes of free-will versus predestination, of hope versus reality, and of romantic love in a situation where the future is believed to be bad.

Lloyd Simcoe and Michiko, despite the loss of her daughter, get married, even though Lloyd's own vision showed him sharing a bed with a woman he did not recognize. In time, they grow apart and divorce. Lloyd later marries the woman he saw in his flashforward.

Those who kill themselves over their dismal prospects are, by their very acts, changing the future they dread.

Two peripheral characters, who did not previously know each other, begin a relationship simply because it was part of their visions.

John O'Ryan is not a god...not exactly. He is an eternal warrior destined to combat the Dark Lord through all time for dominion of the Earth. Follow him, servant of a great race, as he battles his enemy down the halls of time, from the caves of our ancestors to the final confrontation under the hammer of nuclear annihilation.


Excerpt - Chapter 1:

CHAPTER 1


I am not superhuman.
I do have abilities that are far beyond those of any normal man’s, but I am just as human and mortal as anyone on Earth.
The core of my abilities is apparently in the structure of my nervous system. I can take completely conscious control of my entire body. I can direct my will along the chain of synapses instantly to make any part of my body do exactly what I wish it to do.
Last year I learned to play the piano in two hours. My teacher, a mild, gray little man, absolutely refused to believe that I had never touched a keyboard before that day. Earlier this year I stunned a Tae Kwan Do master by learning in less than a week everything he had absorbed in a lifetime of unceasing work. He tried to be humble and polite about it, but it was clear that he was furious with me and deeply ashamed of himself for being so. I left his class.
My powers are growing. I have always been able to control my heartbeat and breathing. I thought everyone could until I began reading about yogis and their “mystical” abilities. For me, their tricks are child’s play.
Two months ago I found myself sitting in a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. I tend to be a solitary man, so I often take my lunch hour late though to avoid the noisy crowds. It was after 3:00 p.m. and the restaurant was almost empty. A few couples were sitting at scattered tables, speaking in hushed tones. A middle-aged pair of tourists were studying the French menu warily, suspicious of food they had never heard of before. A couple of secret lovers sat well toward the rear, holding hands furtively,glancing up toward the door every few seconds. One young woman sat alone, not far from my own table near the front of the restaurant. She was beautiful, with dark hair curling at her shoulders and the strong, classic facial features that marked her as a photographer’s model.
She happened to glance in my direction, and her calm, intelligent eyes penetrated to my soul. Her eyes were large, gray as a polar sea, and seemed to hold all the knowledge of the world. Suddenly I realized that I was not merely a solitary man; I was a lonely man. Like a love-struck puppy, I wanted desperately to go over to her table and introduce myself.
But her gaze shifted to the door. I turned to see a man enter, a strikingly handsome, gold-maned man of that indeterminate age between thirty and fifty. He stood by the door for a moment, then went to the bar up by the curtained plate glass window and took a stool. Even though he was wearing a conservative gray business suit, he looked more like a movie idol or an ancient Greek god than a Manhattan executive who was getting an early start on the cocktail hour.
My gray-eyed beauty stared at him, as if unable to pull herself free of his spell. There was an aura about him, a golden radiance. The air almost seemed to glow where he was sitting. Deep inside me, a long-buried memory began to nag at me. I felt that I knew him, that I had met him long ago. But I could not remember where or when or under what circumstances.
I looked back at the young woman. With a visible effort, she tore her gaze away from the golden man and looked toward me. The corners of her lips curled upward slightly in a smile that might have been an invitation. But the door opened again and she looked away from me once more.
Another man entered the restaurant and went directly to the bar, sitting around its curve so that, his back faced the curtained window. If the first man was a golden angel, this one had the look of a midnight netherworld about him. His face was heavy and grim; his muscular body bulged his clothing. His hair was jet black and his eyes burned angrily under heavy, bushy brows. Even his voice seemed heavy and dark with fury when he ordered a brandy.
I finished my coffee and decided to ask for my check, then stop at the model’s table on my way out. I started to look for my waiter among the four of them loafing by the kitchen doors in the rear of the restaurant, conversing in a mixture of French and Italian. That is what saved me.
A bald little man in a black coat popped out of the kitchen’s swinging door and tossed a black egg-shaped object the length of the restaurant. A hand grenade.
I saw it all as if it were happening in slow motion. I realize now that my reflexes must have suddenly gone into overdrive, operating at a fantastically fast rate. I saw the man ducking back inside the kitchen, the waiters stiffening with surprise, the couples at the other tables still talking, not realizing that death was a second or two away. The young beauty a few tables away from me had her back to the grenade, but the bartender stared straight at it as it clunked on the carpet and rolled lumpily along to within five feet of me.
I shouted a warning and leaped across the intervening tables to knock the young model out of the way of the blast. We thudded to the floor, me on top of her. The clatter of dishes and glassware was lost in the roar of the explosion. The room flashed and thundered. It shook. Then—smoke, screams, the heat of flames, the acrid smell of the explosive.
I got to my feet unharmed. Her table was splintered and the wall behind us shredded by shrapnel. Smoke filled the room. I got to my knees and saw that the young woman was unconscious. There was a gash on her forehead, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. I turned and saw through the smoke the other people in the restaurant mangled and bleeding, sprawled on the floor, slumped against the walls. Some were moaning. A woman sobbed.
I took the young model in my arms and carried her out to the sidewalk. Then I went back in and brought out another couple. As I stretched them out on the pavement among the shards of glass from the blown-out window, the police and firemen began to arrive, sirens shrieking. An ambulance was right behind them. I stood aside and let the professionals take over.
There was no sign of either of the two men who had been sitting at the bar. Both the golden one and the dark man seemed to have disappeared the instant the grenade went off. They were gone by the time I had pulled myself up off the floor. The bartender had been cut in half by the blast. His two customers had vanished.
As the firemen extinguished the smoldering blaze, the police laid out four dead bodies on the sidewalk and covered them with blankets. The medics were treating the wounded. They lifted the model, still unconscious, onto a stretcher. More ambulances arrived, and a crowd gathered around the scene, buzzing.
“Goddamned I.R.A.,” grumbled one of the cops.
“Cheez, they’re tossin’ bombs around here, too, now?”
“Could been the Puerto Ricans,” another cop suggested, his voice weary, exasperated.
“Or the Serbo-Croatians. They set that bomb off in the Statue of Liberty, remember?”
They questioned me for several minutes, then turned me over to the medics for a quick checkup at the back of one of the ambulances.
“You’re lucky, mister,” said the white-jacketed medic. “You didn’t even get your hair mussed.”
Lucky. I felt numb, as if my whole body had been immersed in a thick enveloping fog. I could see and move and breathe and think. But I could not feel. I wanted to be angry, or grief-stricken, or even frightened. But I was as calm as a stupid cow, staring at the world with placid eyes. I thought about the young woman who was being taken off to a hospital. What made me try to save her? Who was responsible for the bombing? Were they trying to kill her? Or one of the men at the bar?
Or me?
Two TV vans had arrived by now, and the news reporters were speaking to the police captain in charge of the scene while their crews unlimbered their mini-cameras. One of the reporters, a sharp-faced woman with a penetratingly nasal voice, interviewed me for a few minutes. I responded to her questions automatically, my mind dull and slow.
Once the police let me leave, I pushed my way through the milling crowd that had been drawn by the excitement and walked the three blocks back to my office. I told no one about the explosion. I went straight to my private cubicle and shut the door.
As evening fell, I was still sitting at my desk—wondering why the grenade had been thrown and how I had escaped being killed by it. Which led me to wondering why I have such physical abilities and whether those two strangers who disappeared from the bar had the same powers. I thought again about the young woman. Closing my eyes, I recalled from my memory the image of the ambulance that had taken her away. St. Mercy Hospital was printed along its side paneling. A quick check with my desktop computer gave me the hospital’s address. I got up from my desk and left the office, the lights turning off automatically behind me.

It's just over two hundred years in the future. Humanity is exploring other star systems and is about to commence the first terraforming on the planet Quraqua. Strange and massive alien artifacts, monuments, have been found in our solar system, and in other systems.

Indeed Quraqua itself was host to a civilisation at one time and archeologists struggle to rescue what artifacts and knowledge they can before the terraforming starts.

One thing has become clear from explorations on Quraqua and the planets: there may not be anyone out there any longer - civilisations grow and blossom, but seem to last only a few thousand years.

Priscilla Hutchins is a space pilot contracted to the World Academy For Science And Technology. She flies scientists to these archeological sites and now shares their thirst to know who these Monument Makers were, why they chose to leave such magnificent structures scattered so far and wide across our galaxy, and why they died.

As the clues accumulate and the startling truth begins to become clear, she's part of the team that are risking their lives to find the engines of God.

This is a great book. It's classic SF with a complex but tight plot and an excellent set of characters: Richard Wald, Maggie Tufu, Janet Allegri, George Hackett, Frank Carson and Henry Jaconi and, of course, Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins. McDevitt develops both the plot and the characters in interesting directions. The plot starts as an academic mystery, includes some very tense and exciting episodes and ends up with exhilarating and rather large-scale action.

McDevitt has managed to imbue this novel with a sense of vast space and time, and also with a sense of vast loss as civilisations rise and fall.

There's even a nice little haiku in there as well:

I have walked upon the stars
And sailed the channels of night
To sip tea with you

Surprisingly I seem to like this book more each time I read it.

What's it got? Archaeology, aliens, advanced civilisations, FTL travel, Flickinger fields and formaldehyde.

-SF Reviews

The Forge of God is a 1987 science fiction novel by Greg Bear. Earth faces destruction when an inscrutable and overwhelming alien form of life attacks.

The Forge of God was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1987 and was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1988.

Plot introduction

The novel features scenes and events including the discovery of an alien in the desert, who clearly says in English, "I'm sorry, but there is bad news," and this alien's subsequent interrogation and autopsy; the discovery of an artificial geological formation and its subsequent nuclear destruction by a desperate military; and the Earth's eventual destruction by the mutual annihilation of a piece of neutronium and a piece of antineutronium dropped into Earth's core.

There is another alien faction at work, however, represented on Earth by small spider-like robots that recruit human agents through some form of mind control. They frantically collect all human data, biological records, tissue samples, seeds, and DNA from the biosphere that they can, and evacuate a handful of people from Earth. In space, this faction's machines combat and eventually destroy the attackers, though not before Earth's fate is sealed. The evacuees eventually settle a newly terraformed Mars while some form the crew of a Ship of the Law to hunt down the home world of the killers, a quest described in the sequel, Anvil of Stars.

The two books show at least one solution to the Fermi paradox, with electromagnetically noisy civilisations being snuffed out by the arrival of self-replicating machines designed to destroy any potential threat to their (possibly long-dead) creators. (A similar theme is explored in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels.)

Anvil of Stars (1992) is a book by Greg Bear and a sequel to The Forge of God. In the novel, volunteers from among the children saved from the recently destroyed Earth are sent on a quest by a galactic faction called "The Benefactors" to find and destroy the civilisation who sent the killer probes in the first place. The Law that the Benefactors subscribe to requires the "Destruction of all intelligences responsible for or associated with the manufacture of self-replicating and destructive devices." The book is written entirely from the point of view of a central character, Martin Gordon, who is the son of a central character in The Forge of God, Arthur Gordon.

There are two main and interwoven themes in the novel. The first is the cost of justice. Destroying the race that attempted to destroy humanity (and, it is later revealed, other races) appears to be a simple matter of retaliation. The Killers (destroyers of humanity), when they are discovered, have formidable philosophical defenses in addition to their vast technological resources. They have created hundreds of sentient races, interlocked in a culture of breathtaking complexity and beauty. The representatives of this cooperative of races claim to not be aware of the Killers' true nature. The combined population of these races number into the trillions, all quite possibly innocents who must be murdered if the Law is to be carried out and the Killers destroyed.

The human and non-human characters in the book wrestle with this question of whether enacting the Law at such a cost is just, and the moral qualms nearly tear the crew apart in conflict.

Author Charles Stross has an alternate interpretation: "If you take Anvil of Stars at face value, it looks like a childish revenge fantasy. But Bear is a subtle writer, and when you start peeling away the layers you find that a very unpleasant tragedy (in the classical sense of the term) nestling inside a much more ambiguous story."

Additionally, Bear explores the complementary theme of the moral compromises required to take and wield power. The children create a libertarian society aboard ship, with few rules and regulations. However, as the pressures of enacting the Law (doing the Job, as they call it) escalate, voluntary cooperation begins to break down. The leaders face the decision between allowing their crew continued freedom, which would result in the disintegration of the ship and abandonment of their purpose, or abandoning their libertarian ideals. Hans, the leader at the time, begins to take increasingly autocratic measures to coerce unity.

Bear does not take an explicit moral stance in the novel. Hans initiates the destruction of the system, innocents and all, without consulting with the crew. He is presented as dictatorial, ruthless, and possibly complicit in murder. After completion of the Job, he is overthrown during a violent confrontation between his supporters and Martin Gordon, a former leader who was a focal point of dissent. It is revealed once the system is destroyed that the Killers were in fact still in the system, and had continued to manufacture fleets of self-replicating machines to destroy alien races. However, while the Killers were destroyed and justice served, trillions of what were likely innocents had to die to accomplish this. Bear leaves the human crew torn between relief that their work is complete and their guilt that they were little better than those they had come to destroy.

The book is notable for how well it conveys the alienness and colossal scale of the alien home system, as well as the scope and morality of the final battle. The novel also contains a very original gestalt alien race referred to by the humans as 'Brothers', composed of non-sentient worm-like creatures (Cords) that join to form sentient individuals (Braids).

*more to come later*