Book Review: The World at the End of Time

 

© 1990 by Frederick Pohl

 

A little while ago the urge to cleanse my reading palate hit me hard. Said palate had gorged itself on religion and war tracts, interspersed with the fantasy novel here and the horror tale there. So what better emetic than some good ol’ roll up yer sleeves and split the atom hard sci fi? After all, do I not claim hard sci fi the sugar-and-phosphate ladder of my literary DNA? I do. And, pondering these things late one night, I could not recall the last hard SF novel I read. Would 1950s Asimov count? How about psychedelic Silverberg? Jules Verne?

So I ran my fingers up and down the towers of paperbacks behind my desk and selected a medium-sized work purchased on 9-25-09, as my jeweler’s script on the inside cover reminded me. Frederik Pohl’s 1990 epic, The World at the End of Time. Perfect!

The 407-page paperback includes some really, really neat SF concepts. Right there in the title we have the end of the Universe, and what might happen if one had a front-row seat to it. Also included, at no extra charge, are a new type of alien entities made of plasma who live in the centers of stars, cryosleep, the nuts and bolts of colonizing new worlds light years away, semi-sentient machines to forage for food and raw materials, the evolution of political and religious ideas across the centuries, Einsteinian relativity in theory and practice, genetic manipulation to designer specs. Heck, a pandemic even makes a cameo. All in all, a nice refreshing departure from my usual literary fare.

The story follows two individuals over the course of either four thousand years or forty billion years – depending upon, of course, your relativistic frame of reference. There’s young Viktor Sorricaine, twelve at novel’s start and freshly thawed from a cryo tube en route to his new home world. His dad’s an astrophysicist, and they’ve detected some stars doing some weird things. Then there’s Wan-To, a creature of plasma living in the star Viktor’s dad is observing, a being able to manipulate matter, tachyons, and Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky particles (paired particles such that the behavior of one influences instantaneously the behavior of the other even though they be separated by the length of the entire Universe). Wan-To uses neutrinos to communicate thoughts in his vast, vastly spaced body the same our minds use neurons. And as Viktor has no idea of Wan-To’s existence, neither does the star creature ours.

Then we hold on as crises follows crises as the rag-tag band of human colonists fight for survival, just as Wan-To fights for his among his people. Each subtly influences the other, especially in a way which gives the gist of the novel if revealed. Oh, okay, Wan-To pulls the colonists solar system out of local time and space and preserves it while the rest of the Universe ages to its icy death forty billion years later. Oops, spoilers.

It was a decent read, fast, and a page turner once I got myself oriented in the novel about 50 pages in. Pohl is one of the masters of SF – was – and I’ve highly reviewed his works Man Plus and Merchants of Venus here in these electronic pages. Also remember reading his award-winning Gateway novel way back as a young lad in the 80s or 90s, and that’s due for a re-read. He’s got a raw, smart-ass edge to him, enjoyably so, and he’s paid attention in science class. I need to read more of his books.

Overall, recommended.

Grade: A-minus.