Content:

Robert J. Sawyer has combined the rather up-to-date issue of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in, or rather, under Switzerland with an extraordinary idea.

The whole population of earth gets a glimpse of their individual future, a glimpse of exactly the same moment as everybody else's glimpse.

In doing so, Sawyer creates a truely global event. I put emphasis on this because usually, global events are either catastrophic (meteor, flood, alien invasion etc.) or global only in the sense of "everybody hooked up to media feeds".

What distinguishes it from a catastrophe is the fact that the timescale involved is "within my life time", as seen from at least 50% of the population, at the same time it is not as imminent as that flaming piece of rock in the sky.

This idea and it's execution gives the reader room to breathe and think: What would I do, had I seen this or that? What is it that I would like to see?

I might add that the book would not have suffered from a less "science fiction-ish" end. I was reading "Last and First Men" by Stapledon at the same time and there are similarities in the underlying idea. Sawyer could maybe have leaned more towards Grimwood's Replay.

Naturally, the TV series has been immensely Americanized and Hollywoodized. It's a bit like Jazz: Variations on a theme. An awesome theme at that.