Marooned in Realtime is certainly a refreshing change from the other Scifi that I’ve read. Vinge provides a way to skirt around what he calls a Singularity, and the implications and reponses of people jumping across millenia in a time bubble only to return and find that the entire civilization has been abandoned. It’s not an enviable plot by any means, but Vinge makes gigantic issues seem smaller, and the whole story is told from the PoV of an old-fashioned detective, W.W. Brierson, who eventually manages to solve a mystery (though not the mystery that we want him to solve)
The fact that the greatest mystery of them all is still unresolved (how the world got abandoned) is overshadowed by a genuine resolution that the story brings about, quite astonishingly simple and satisfying in that respect. I liked this.
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