MMM: Nose, Flashforward,
You know you've got a big nose when you carve off a piece of it while shaving.
BTW, it really hurts. And using a styptic pencil to stop the bleeding is also exquisitely painful. And it takes forever to heal on account of there not being much actual flesh in the nostril area. On the whole, I don't recommend the experience. Especially now that I've done it twice.
-----------
I hope you enjoyed that little foray into the life and times of a clutz. Because now we're back to the tales of a bookworm with another Book Review!!!! (try to contain your excitement)
Flashforward, by Robert J. Sawyer is one of those books I picked up because SciFi Wire reported that it's being produced into a TV show. I'm a fan of sci-fi television, so I did a quick check of the old Library and found it could be had for the wanting. And then it sat on my shelf as I had to try (in vain) to finish my non-renewable book about traffic, and the latest Grisham. And probably something else. But then I got back to it, and I'm glad I did.
The plot goes like this: The entire world receives, as the side-effect of an experiment at CERN, a flash twenty-one years into the future. They see the world through their future-selves' eyes. For about two minutes. Then, back to reality. Of course, since everybody goes limp during the two minutes, thousands die in auto and air accidents. So the world reels from both the direct and indirect results of the Flashforward, as it comes to be called.
The real meat of the book is in the question of how people deal with their Insider information about the future. For one man, he finds that he's married to someone other than the woman he's currently engaged to. So, does he pull the plug on marrying his intended since he knows it won't last? For another, he has no Flashforward, leading him to suspect he doesn't live another twenty-one years. So it's important to him to find out the circumstances of his death. And on and on.
Should everyone assume the future is immutable? What about Free Will? Should the experiment be repeated to see if anything changed as a result of the first Flashforward? Will the experiment work again? And can that apparently future-dead man prevent his death?
The really cool thing about that book was that it had a lot of almost inside-jokes for science and sci-fi fans. The characters are aware of contemporary science and sci-fi authors and use references from both categories when discussing causality and free will. Very cool.
The end got a bit strange, but the core story is quite gripping. It should actually make good TV.
