Ed's Mini Book Review - Flash Forward by Robert Sawyer

Flash Forward, as you may or may not know, is a TV show on ABC (soon-to-be former TV show) that has a great set-up. Everyone in the world blacks out for two minutes and while you are out, you get a glimpse, two minutes worth, of your future.

The TV show, to fit it into a TV season sets the Flash Forward to eight months in the future whereas the book sets it to twenty years in the future. Basically, the TV show has almost nothing in common with the book, just that there was a Flash Forward so if you read the book hoping for more insight into characters and stories that intrigued you from the show, then you'll be disappointed. And that's not a bad thing since the show ended up doing poorly in the ratings and got canned after one season.

So, the book takes a different road than the show. Instead of focusing on the 'who-dunnit' aspect of teh Flash Forward, the book looks at it from the point of view of the scientists who believe they unwittingly caused it to happen. The guilt and grief about those that died while the blacked out and those that see a future not to their liking. Then we get the scientific analyses of having foreknowledge, which now everyone has, and the possibility of changing the future. Can you do it? Will time correct itself? Will you just end up ensuring that your future will happen no matter what you do?

The books tends to, at points, get bogged down with all of the scientific theory and sometimes feels as though it is just wasting time to get to the payoff of what happens when that magical Flash Forward time of twenty years down the road comes up. Does it come true? Can you change it? All questions that you are wondering throughout the book, building to that payoff, but the payoff comes off fairly flat.

My Grade: B-

LL