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Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

Reviewed by Coral


What would happen if the whole of humanity had their conscious minds displaced for 2 minutes? How many lives would be lost in the aftermath of this worldwide blackout? And, if during these 2 minutes, people were given a glimpse of their own future, how would that impact their present lives?

I bought this book when I started watching the series; it’s taken me nearly 3 years to get to and it made me miss the TV show.

It was weird how there was like one character who was the same from the book and the TV show, but not really because his personality and story were completely different. A lot of the stories I didn’t like from the TV show weren’t in the book, which made me happy. Some of the stories that had been adapted from the book for the show worked better in the book (the person who doesn’t see anything which implies they’ll be dead in the future, the person who sees themselves with a romantic partner different from who they are currently with) while some didn’t (person who can’t bare the future they saw and kills himself, people who start a romantic relationship because they saw a vision of themselves together in the future).

I understand why the focus of the TV show was on the police aspect, but I think for the book focusing on the science worked. The explanation for the Flashforward worked a lot better for me than the one world conspiracy of the show.

I felt that the book handled the possibility of the futures they saw not being fixed a lot better than the show did. That was a frustrating part of the TV show, where things would happen (like the agent who kills himself, the man who didn’t have a vision surviving, a man who did have a vision being killed) and still everyone reacts like the visions are set in stone. In the book, it was more realistic, where people kind of accept that it is like Ebenezer Scrooge, being given a glimpse of how your life could turn out.

I felt that the TV show gave us a wider world scope of the visions. In the book, the action was sort of centered on a group of main characters and while we got some visions of other people, it wasn’t a lot of them. In the show, it felt like we at least had the possibility of exploring the wider world of the visions.

I liked the ending and the possibilities and questions it raised, even if there were no answers. Though, and this may be because I couldn’t always follow the scientific explanations, there seemed to be a logic flaw with the reasoning behind one of the characters actions at the end.

Overall, I enjoyed this book a lot, though I don’t think I would reread it.

 

Grade: B

 

Ruby's Review:

Unlike my sister, I didn’t enjoy this book. For me it was very sluggish and dull. I could not relate to any of the main characters; they seemed very unrealistic to me. Every character seemed totally calm and level headed, even the secondary and tertiary characters were unusually calm and sedate about the whole thing. I mean the entire world blacked out and who knows how many people died and everyone was clam. There was very little panic shown in the book that it just seemed too farfetched.font>

The style of writing bothered me too. I couldn’t get over how everyone talked with proper English and actual full sentences.

Everything just seemed way too unbelievable for me to actually buy anything that was being put forth by the author.

 Grade: D