Across Realtime

This book consists of two related novels that I've reviewed separately, [b:The Peace War 1280979 The Peace War Vernor Vinge https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1182468901l/1280979.SY75.jpg 1269997] and [b:Marooned in Realtime 1280978 Marooned in Realtime Vernor Vinge https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1332038306l/1280978.SY75.jpg 448211], plus a related novella, “The Ungoverned”.Altogether, they form a powerful and exciting vision of the future. It's not a future that's at all likely to happen, but then no fictional futures are ever likely to happen: the future is unimaginable. Nevertheless, there are aspects of this future that are interesting and perhaps educational.A prerequisite for the two novels and the novella is the development of bobble technology. A bobble is a kind of spherical force field, but it has certain specific characteristics that have interesting implications.Apart from that, in this future Vinge plays with the idea of anarcho-capitalism. He's saying, for the purpose of these stories, let's just suppose that anarcho-capitalism can be made to work—not as a kind of utopia, but working well enough to be usable.