Where will you be on October 23, 2030?

I’m becom­ing con­cerned that my entire read­ing list con­sists of books I’ve learned about through hav­ing watched the tele­vi­sion shows. I dis­cov­ered the Tem­per­ence Bren­nan nov­els by watch­ing the show Bones, Of course Star Trek needs no expla­na­tion, and now Flash­For­ward, a nov­el I did­n’t know exist­ed until ABC made it into a TV series. Worst of all, as I write this I’m about a third of the way through  Heat Wave «by» Richard Cas­tle, who isn’t even a real per­son. It’s a book pur­port­ed­ly writ­ten by a char­ac­ter in a TV show. More about that later.

Flash­For­ward is what sci­ence fic­tion is sup­posed to be. Not pulp genre fic­tion, but a real «what if» sto­ry, involv­ing enough real sci­ence to make an edu­cat­ed layper­son com­fort­able with the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. It is the sto­ry of physi­cists who, while per­form­ing high-ener­gy exper­i­ments in search of the Hig­gs Boson, appa­rant­ly cause a world­wide black­out where every human being expe­ri­ences two min­utes of their own life as they will expe­ri­ence it twen­ty years into the future.

This starts an inves­ti­ga­tion into the mean­ing and cause of the phe­nom­e­non which is nev­er ful­ly explained. There’s a lot of the­o­riz­ing, but noth­ing is tru­ly def­i­nite. It asks the ques­tions about whether the future can be changed and of course there is sim­pli­fied dis­cus­sion of quan­tum mechan­ics. Schrödinger’s cat both appears and does not appear in this nov­el; you’ll have to read it your­self to col­lapse that wave.

Sawyer is a writer with a gift for clar­i­fy­ing com­plex con­cepts, but his spec­u­la­tion about the world of the future (2009 writ­ten in 1999) seems to reveal some of his own per­son­al prej­u­dices. Some social changes are approved of while oth­ers are light­ly mocked as an illus­tra­tion of the fool­ish­ness of humankind. A few times I felt con­de­scend­ed to by the author when it was revealed that in the future (Sawyer’s vision of 2030), Amer­i­ca will final­ly have adopt­ed the met­ric sys­tem, will have a black pres­i­dent, and won’t have yet elect­ed a woman to the pres­i­den­cy. Thank­ful­ly these moments were few but they did detract slight­ly from an oth­er­wise strong novel.

I had­n’t thought about it recent­ly, but twen­ty years ago or more there were adver­tise­ments for Hen­ry Wein­hardt’s beer shown here in Cal­i­for­nia that showed a «crazy» old­timer telling cow­boys about the future. I always thought those were clever ads: «A hun­dred years from now, only lit­tle girls will ride hors­es. Men will walk on the moon! And Hen­ry Wein­hardt’s will be sold in New York City.» The cow­boys dis­missed the old­timer, and the ad stressed that the brand was local and only avail­able here on the West Coast.

It’s uni­ver­sal. Who does­n’t won­der about the future or wish the past could be changed? Even peo­ple who claim to live ful­ly in the moment must have at least the occa­sion­al curi­ous thought about it. Time trav­el is a com­mon theme in sci­ence fic­tion which is itself often an attempt to pre­dict the future. Flash For­ward touch­es all the com­mon ques­tions about para­dox and weaves them into an absorb­ing sto­ry where not know­ing the answers to the big ques­tions about time means not know­ing the out­come for the «small ques­tions» about the char­ac­ters. Even when an answer seems obvi­ous, Sawyer main­tains enough doubt about it to build the kind of ten­sion that makes the sto­ry gripping.

Like most nov­els made into tele­vi­sion shows late­ly, the resem­blance between Flash­For­ward the TV show and Flash­For­ward the nov­el is min­i­mal. I have to won­der if TV stu­dios could adapt Crime and Pun­ish­ment with­out mak­ing Raskol­nikov into an FBI agent in Los Angeles.