Vernor Vinge has always been a man of great ideas. In every single one of his books that I have read, one of the central ideas in it has been unique or, at the very least, extremely interesting. For example, in The Witling, he has a group of aliens that can teleport but, because he is a hard science fiction writer, he does it in such a way that it still takes into account momentum and everything else on a planetary scale. This then shapes the way that they teleport and makes the story much more interesting than a normal teleportation story. In another of his stories (A Fire Upon the Deep), there is an alien species that look like dogs. However, alone they are only semi-sentient. But they can commucate with each other to form packs which work together as one brain. If the packs get too big, though, the number of competing desires and ideas becomes impossible to manage and they are no longer a functioning organism. These are just two of his ideas that have convinced me that he is definitely worth reading.
As I mentioned in the warning, Across Realtime is two books. They both take place in the same universe but one takes place long after the other. There are very few repeated characters (and it could be argued that there are none) but the second book takes the science concepts introduced in the first book and takes them to their logical conclusion. Since I have hyped his ideas up until this point, you are probably wondering what those science concepts are in this book. Before the book starts a group of people called The Peace Authority has become the ultimate power in the world because they have developed a technology called bobbles. These bobbles are spheres that nothing can penetrate, not light, heat, or anything else. They have covered all of the military installations in the world with these bobbles and, because of this, most governments have broken down. (THIS IS WHERE THE MINOR SPOILERS BEGIN) Through the course of the book, the protagonists discover a key fact about the bobbles: time stops within them. They also discover how to modulate the amount of time that a bobble is active for, allowing them to be used defensively or offensively.
The second book takes place "mega years" in the future, with a different protagonist. This protagonist was introduced in the short story "The Ungoverned" which was collected in a short story collection (which I will review soon). I read that story in between the two parts of Across Realtime. Honestly, I am very glad that I did. It doesn't contribute very much to the main story, but it fills in a lot of background for some of the characters which is nice in the beginning.
Vernor Vinge avoids predicting what technological heights humanity will have reached millions of years in the future by having some people "miss" some event where all of the people except for those who were bobbled. The story in the second part is kind of a mystery story trying to figure out how someone managed to get left outside a bobble for such a long period of time despite safety protocols.
(THIS IS WHERE THE MINOR SPOILERS END) I really enjoyed this book, as I have every Vernor Vinge book I have read. One of my only problems with it was that it did not include the aforementioned short story. (Note: one edition of the book does contain this story but the one I read does not) Overall, I would give this book a 92%.
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