Marooned in Realtime is a science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge, first published in 1986. It is a sequel to The Peace War and The Ungoverned, with characters returning from both.
The major initial technology change is the invention of the Bobble, a projected sphere that freezes time within its volume. For the duration of the sphere's existence (which is set at its creation and cannot be altered), nothing can damage it or affect its contents. The technology has a range of uses, from short-term bobbles used for storage or crash protection, to longer-term bobbles with applications like deep space exploration — not to mention the people who, for a variety of reasons, choose to have themselves bobbled so that they can see what the world will be like decades or centuries down the line.
What the world is like, beyond a certain point, is — deserted. The entire human race, apart from that portion of it that was bobbled at the time, has completely vanished, leaving no clear evidence of why. (Theories include, but are not limited to, a big final war, hostile aliens, and/or The Singularity.) Those who come out of stasis are slowly rounded up and brought to a meeting point further down the timeline, hoping to accumulate enough people and technology to reboot civilization and prevent the extinction of humanity's remnant.
During one move a leader of the colony is stranded outside stasis, starting a murder/mystery investigation to discover who did it and why.
Marooned in Realtime contains examples of:
- Action Bomb: The "grenade beetles" that have evolved after human civilization disappeared. Distinctive slow-moving herbivore/scavenger insects that no local predator would dare to bother — they're too slow to keep a human from picking one up and shaking it — because none are stupid enough to bother a hand-sized bug capable of exploding like a hand grenade when annoyed enough. One cripples Marta's foot a few years into her marooning — and Wil is able to use them to drive off a pack of near-dogs stalking him and Della when they are stranded during the climactic battle.
- The Aloner:
- Marta Korolev is marooned in realtime for forty years without shelter or tools or friends until she dies of old age.
- Yelena's choice of punishment for this crime is, incredibly, even worse; she does the same to Juan Chanson, except she left him with a medical auton. He was free to live as long as he wished. It thus takes him ten thousand years to die of madness.
- Apocalypse Not: World War III turned the entire planet into a Terminally Dependent Society under the Peace Authority, and the "Peace War" almost ended in the Peace unleashing nukes on the known and suspected locations of their enemies while they hid in Bobbles. Twenty years later, there were trailer parks on the moon.
- Apocalyptic Log: Marta's diary of being marooned in real time, while the rest of the colony used stasis fields to leap forward in time. Decades long record of attempting to change the appearance of the surface of the planet enough to trigger the observation satellites. The hero has to be sedated after reading the final entries.
- But What About the Astronauts?: One of the survivors was out on a deep space exploration mission when the Extinction happened.
- California Collapse: On the distant future Earth, millions of years of tectonic activity have resulted in California splitting off from the mainland and becoming an island, which the Korolevs name "Calafia".
- Chekhov's Boomerang: Early in the book, Wil learns that one of the other colonists is the criminal who trapped him in stasis, hiding out under a new face and a new identity. That subplot gets resolved by the halfway mark, but also serves as foreshadowing for the reveal at the climax that another, much worse, criminal is also concealed among the colonists under a new face and a new identity.
- Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit: The Dasgupta brothers went into stasis as part of one of these, and woke to find that the Extinction had happened and there were no longer any banks.
- The Conqueror: One of the survivors is really Peace Authority Director Christian Gerrault, "The Butcher of Eurafrica", who escaped justice at the end of The Peace War and has been plotting to re-conquer the world. When his secret is close to being discovered, he kills half of the last three hundred humans, trashes over ninety percent of the remaining technology, then holds the survivors for ransom through his monopoly of the last surviving human zygotes.
- Deflector Shields: Bobbles can function as these.
- Dying Clue: Marooned in Realtime features possibly the most epic case of "murder victim writes cryptic final message" in the entire history of detective fiction. The murderer uses a uniquely science-fictional murder weapon that results in a four-decades long, lingering death of old age for the victim, so she has time to write a final message over two million words long — but the important bit is still so cryptic only one man could see it — and it's not her lover. This is because the murderer is watching her the entire time, and would have destroyed anything that looked like a clue to his identity.
- Everyone Is a Suspect: Wil notes early in the investigation that motive isn't going to be much use in narrowing down the suspects, because all the people who could have killed Marta had some reason for resenting her or wanting her colony project to fail.
- Famous, Famous, Fictional: The background music at the Robinsons' party ranges "from Strauss waltzes, to the Beatles, to W. W. Arai": two real musicians from the 19th and 20th centuries, followed by a fictional one from the 21st.
- Hurl It into the Sun: Brought up as one way to kill a person who's Bobbled themself for protection. Even that won't break through the Bobble — but the Bobble's got to pop some time...
- Invisible Aliens: Della Lu has spent millennia exploring the galaxy, and found signs of only three other sapient species — all of whom have disappeared the same way humans have. She suggests that when species attain The Singularity, they uniformly vanish from the universe, at least from the perspective of everyone else.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: The true nature of the Bobbles is a big plot twist in The Peace War, but it's almost impossible to talk about this novel without it.
- Law Enforcement, Inc.: In the 21st century, following a Depopulation Bomb, large parts of the former United States had become autonomous communities with no overarching government where the peace was kept by private protection companies. Wil Brierson was a detective working for one such company.
- Never One Murder: The death of Jason Mudge, partway through the novel, is also the work of Marta's murderer; Mudge was the only other person still living who knew the secret he murdered Marta to protect.
- No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: A villainous example, at the climax.
- One-Steve Limit: Marooned in Realtime has three separate characters with the given names "Wili Wachendon", in honour of the hero of The Peace War, but it still fits this trope because they each prefer a different way of abbreviating it from each other and from the original: Wil Brierson, Bil Sanchez, W. W. Arai.
- Orion Drive: Della's spaceship has one; bobble technology makes this method of travel safe.
- Portal Cut: Bobbles cut through anything intersecting the field's boundary when they form.
- When Marta Korolev is trapped outside the bobble, her robot bodyguard Fred is floating right at the boundary and is sliced in half by the bobble as it appears. It's likely, though not explicitly confirmed, that the villain of the novel deliberately timed the formation of the bobble so that its boundary would cut through Fred and deprive Marta of his assistance.
- At one point, Wil is bobbled as an emergency protective measure while he's inside his house, then the bobble is removed from the house; when he returns later, he finds a curved slice taken out of the walls (those that weren't demolished to get the bobble out) and floor.
- Ragnarök Proofing: Averted in Marooned in Realtime, where the realistic lack of this is a plot point.
- Shrouded in Myth: Wil Brierson gets a bit of this regarding his detective abilities. Early in his career he shut down North America's last major government for war crimes, and after he was forcibly bobbled his son dealt with his loss by writing a series of acclaimed detective novels starring a version of him that captured his assailant before he could bobble him. As a result, all of humanity thinks of him as a Real Life Sherlock Holmes. Luckily, he is pretty damned good, managing to save Humanity from its last surviving dictator as a side note to finding humanity's last murderer.
- The Singularity: One of the theories about what happened to humanity, and the one that the narrative implies is most likely to be correct. From the last survivor to go into stasis, they know that as the singularity approached, people became brighter, more connected and more powerful. But what actually happened remains unknown and perhaps unknowable.
- Slept Through the Apocalypse: All the characters.
- The Slow Path: What the title of Marooned in Realtime refers to.
- Space Age Stasis: In Marooned in Realtime, set in the distant future, a group of survivors have missed The Singularity and are stuck with only a handful of very advanced robots and tools that they cannot rebuild, effectively making further advances impossible.
- Sphere of Destruction: The effect of using a Bobble as a weapon.
- Summation Gathering: At the climax, complete with Conversational Troping. Notably, Wil denounces it as an act of desperation:Someday he would have to read Billy's novels. Had the boy really ended each by a confrontation with a roomful of suspects? In his real life, this was only the third time he had ever seen such a thing. Normally, you identified the criminal, then arrested him. A denouement with a roomful — in this case, an auditoriumful — of suspects meant that you lacked either the knowledge or the power to accomplish an arrest. Any competent criminal realized this, too; the situation was failure in the making.
- We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: Marooned in Realtime has people in the far future with the medical technology to eliminate all disease and aging — but what if you outlive the civilisation?
