With the new ABC (US) series of the same name and premise, I thought I would put up the review I wrote when I read the book years ago. It’s taken directly from my personal book journal (notes to self), so it’s a little disjointed:
Interesting time travel book – the consciousness of all people in the world is flung forward 21 years into the future. Some people glimpse their own future lives, some are reading newspapers or watching TV about others, some see nothing – because they’re dead.
The book is an examination of how people react to knowing their futures, and if the future is immutable or not…but this is quite quickly resolved (yes, it can be changed), which was disappointing. And the ending, to do with the second flash forward 21 years later, is also disappointing.
I did enjoy the read, but there were major flaws, I thought, with how the author portrayed people reacting. The most glaring was early, with a character coming to find her child dead, hit by a car in the carpark of her school during the chaos of the flash forward. She sits by the body for an hour, maybe less, and then goes back to work at CERN because she is supposedly needed in the aftermath of the disaster – mind you, she’s a physicist, not an ER doctor. She leaves the body of her dead child lying in the carpark. I just…honestly, I just cannot imagine it.
It also started devolving into as-you-know type exposition in dialogue to get across the physics proposed as the cause. I think this is systematic of the problem with the book – the author tried to put in human emotion but it was unbalanced with the science/action elements. For example, he devotes pages and pages to whether two characters should stay together because they know they’re not together in the future – they finally decide to, and then he reveals in a single paragraph that they broke up ten years later, but then devotes pages to an ‘exciting’ chase in the collider tunnel which I had to skim-read because I got so bored with it. So many other things could have been explored with this premise and weren’t.
There was also a glaring probability error – an astronomer claiming that because the event happened exactly at 12.00.00 and the probability of that is one in 3,600 (ie the number of seconds in an hour), it must have been a human-caused event. Of course, the probability of it happening at any other second in the hour is also one in 3,600; just because that time has significance to us doesn’t make it more or less likely (but I see what he was trying to get at).
I really liked the premise of the book, no matter I thought it was flawed in its execution, so I’ll be interested to check out the series Flash Forward, which is a 6-month forward flash, to see how they handle it.
Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au, Australia’s biggest online bookstore. All their book prices are guaranteed better than Amazon and they do free delivery for orders over $49.
Thank you for this review. I caught that it was based on a book but the credits go by so fast I didn’t catch the author’s name. Despite the flaws I do still want to read it.
No worries – like I say, the premise was great and it’s worth reading, especially if you like the series (though I doubt there is anything in common there, bar the premise). It wasn’t entirely to my taste, but I have incredibly idiosyncratic tastes.
[...] Wendy Palmer [...]
Yeah season continues with episode 12 I’m happy because ABC is making more episodes for flashforward because it was a fight between them for episodes