SOJALS rating:

Good (3/5)

I first read this on the 19th February 2007.

Tyler Dupree is our narrator through the next thirty years. These are strange years. Some unknown power has enshrouded and isolated the Earth from the rest of the Universe. While a year passes on Earth, 10 billion pass in the Universe outside. Tyler narrates the tale of himself , his childhood friends Diane an Jason Lawton for thirty of those Earth years.

while these years slip by on Earth, the rest of the Universe ages by 300 billion years. We are missing so much, but there is one way we may gain - that vast swathe of time means that we have time to bioenginner a neighbouring planet, seed it with a few humans and in a dilated blink of our eyes meet the sophisticated descendents from those long ago forebears, and perhaps these descendents will have found the answers that we so desperately need but have had no time to find.

Wow! A lovely old-fashioned novel chock full of human interest, great deeds and world-shattering events it most certainly deserved its Hugo.