Books › A world out of time
A world out of time
256 pages
A mind-expanding plunge into deep time and relativistic physics, where the ultimate survival test awaits at the end of eternity.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like strapping into a ramjet and accelerating toward the galactic core, offering a dizzying, idea-dense plunge into the sheer scale of deep time. The narrative moves with a brisk, problem-solving momentum, trading deep emotional introspection for the awe-inspiring mechanics of relativistic travel and cosmic engineering. You are immersed in an atmosphere of profound isolation and mind-bending temporal distortion, sharing the protagonist's disorientation as he navigates a universe that has left him millions of years behind. The prose is classic hard SF: functional, clear, and relentlessly focused on the physics of survival. It will thoroughly delight readers who crave massive speculative concepts, bizarre far-future societies, and the cold, thrilling logic of a universe stretched to its absolute limits.
- Mood
- awe-inspiring
- isolated
- mind-bending
- alienating
- Tone
- analytical
- adventurous
- detached
- speculative
- wry
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the vastness of deep time · survival against cosmic odds · loss of humanity · technological hubris · the alienation of immortality
- The writing
- Functional, idea-driven, and scientifically grounded, prioritizing the clarity of mind-bending physics over lyrical flourish.
- The arc
- Begins with disorienting captivity and desperate rebellion, expanding into cosmic awe before settling into a gritty, surreal fight for survival in an unrecognizable future.
- Who it's for
- Fans of classic hard science fiction who love massive scales of time and space, relativistic physics, and protagonists who solve problems through engineering and wit.
Content notes
- body swapping
- existential dread
- isolation
About the book
Jaybee Corbell awoke after more than 200 years as a corpsicle -- in someone else\'s body, and under sentence of instant annihilation if he made a wrong move while they were training him for a one-way mission to the stars. But Corbell picked his time and made his own move. Once he was outbound, where the Society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core, where the unimaginable energies of the Universe wrenched the fabric of time and space and promised final escape from his captors. Then he returned to an Earth eons older than the one he\'d left...a planet that had had 3,000,000 years to develop perils he had never dreamed of -- perils that became nightmares that he had to escape...somehow!.
Description from Open Library.
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