The World at the End of Time
Frederik Pohl
-*
Most of the books I read are pretty good. Every now and then I find a book that I just don't want to read after I've gotten it home from the library. Nothing wrong with those books necessarily, they just don't strike my interests at the time. More rarely I start a book and read it to the end, wishing it would end sooner. By definition they can never end soon enough.
That was the case with this book. Pohl would sucker me along with some interesting scientific explanations held weakly together by an over complicated picaresque plot, suspended in a goo of wordy exposition and dialog. Pohl has the reputation of being a good story teller, and I can see glimpses of that in this book.
Plot: Earth sends interstellar colonists to far away planet. Un-beknownst to puny earthlings, mighty sociopathic, paranoid star-being is hanging out in the area, afraid that copies he has made of himself are out to get him (Reasonable since they are copies -- so clever!) So he blows up stars where he thinks they live. But he doesn't get all of them. What to do? Send cluster of decoy stars and planets off to edge of universe, causing time dilation. Puny earthlings have colonized one of the planets in cluster, so off they go too! Silly earthlings never figure out what happened only that they are traveling with a cluster of stars near the speed of light. Meanwhile our hero, Victor, gets frozen and thawed out many times to accommodate the story's conceit. Poor Victor, things change. World freezes too. Thaws. Third time he thaws, people really different, have evolved into long, skinny beings from living in orbit (Hmmm . . . LeMark lives!). Becomes sex slave. Misses wife. Goes back to planet. Nothing living even though environment can support it. But super technology works for thousands of years keeping people frozen as "corpsicles." Victor realizes the universe is done except for the last cluster of stars. Star being realizes that too, is on his way ... when the book ends.
You can take it from there. The physics science seems like it is based on real physics. Cloning, environmental science seems poorly conceived.There are probably three good books in this one. But the one needed serious editing. I wonder if his contract called for 400 pages (It's 407, so I'm suspicious.) Anyway, don't read it. That's supposed to be a minus star rating under the author name.
