Two in one: The Peace War, and Marooned in Realtime. Both are good; the sweep of vision makes MiR better. This is my second read: while I remembered the story vaguely I'd forgotten all the details - it has been gathering dust on my bookshelves for decades - including, fortunately, whodunnit in the second.
The first is an exciting unlikely-cast-of-underdogs-defeat-evil-govt adventure story. The second is effectively a whodunnit, but set across a wonderful background.
I don't propose to go over the plots, since you'll find those elsewhere or, better still, just read them; so I'll assume you know those.
The most obvious flaw in TPW is having Rosas betray the biofolk to the Peace; despite the excuses attempted, this isn't convincing. And to compound that by having Wily denounce Rosas and Lu and, incredibly, for no-one to even bother investigate is utterly implausible. Somehow their operation was discovered, they have no interest in finding out how; mysteriously, those three escape, they show no puzzlement at all; and these people are supposed to be paranoid survivors? And it seems pointless: the denouncement could simply have been skipped.
The more interesting flaw, though, is the problem of a bunch of bureaucrats taking over the world (as this Goodreads review points out; it's wrong about the would-bobbles-float, though). I think this wouldn't work on both organisational and practical terms. On practical terms, having your "bobbler" is pretty useless without targetting. Mysteriously, their first "hit" is the returning orbiter, which would have been going really rather fast: you'd need direct access to some military radar, and where would that come from? And how would you extend that worldwide? On an organisational level, I just don't see it: even if you had some evil corporate / bureaucratic core, how would you keep the conspiracy secret, yet wide enough to be active?
TPW apparently lost out to Neuromancer for the Nebula; I would have made the same choice; N is beautiful in a way TPW isn't; while a decent book it is in some respects pedestrian.
MiR, though, raises it's sights across 50 Myr. With bobble-tech understood and general tech exponentially increasing, it becomes possible to, effectively, time-travel forwards. Sometime early in the 2200's, though, everyone-else disappears; part of the book is speculation (aliens? Singularity? War?) about what might have made everyone vanish. And so we're left with a small cast of survivors: people who have accidentally or maliciously been bobbled forwards; those who deliberately left.
For the sake of the story, it is necessary that those who remain be few in number. This doesn't seem plausible. Faced with the chance of "going forwards" so easily I bet many many would take it: millions more than thousands, certainly not the handful that VV permits.
But this gives us some grand scenes: the opening, where countless megatonnes of nukes liquify the crust to release a long-buried bobble; the guy who survives falling into the sun; spacecraft propulsion, by setting off a nuke behind a precisely-controlled bobble shell. And, relatedly, the possibility of exploring the galaxy, slowly in realtime, but with "not much" subjective time. Though he has allowed himself indefinite life extension via bioscience too.
Again, it is odd (or would be odd; it is perhaps necessary for the story) that so few people chose to explore the galaxy, in an assumed world where the tech to do so was within ordinary reach. This is a commonplace of such books: one of the characters, as background, mentions having found the ruins of alien civilisations. Casually, in conversation. But no-one follows up. What has been said, has never been written down. WTF? It just isn't even faintly believeable.
As an aside, the casual throwaway penetrating-everyone's-computers is about as accurate as Neuromancer's view of cyberspace.
And in the end, the villains are a bit dull; but perhaps that isn't the important bit; the important bit was the finding them.
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