8 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Series Across Real Time Pages 286 pp Publisher James Frenkel | 4/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date August 1984 Originally published August 1984 Genre Science Fiction OCLC 10996240 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (hardback & paperback) Nominations Hugo Award for Best Novel, Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Prometheus Award for Best Novel Similar Vernor Vinge books, Across Realtime books, Science Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Peace War is a science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge, about authoritarianism and technological progress. It was first published as a serial in Analog in 1984, and then appeared in book form shortly afterward. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1985. Its sequels are "The Ungoverned", which was a novella published in his collection True Names and Other Dangers, and the novel Marooned in Realtime. The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime were collected in Across Realtime (Baen Books, 1991).
Plot
The story takes place in 2048, 51 years after scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory develop "the ultimate weapon", a force field generating device they term a Bobbler. The bureaucracy running the Laboratory use it to enforce an end to conventional warfare (triggering a brief war in the process), calling themselves the Peace Authority. The Bobbler creates a perfectly spherical, impenetrable, and persistent shield around or through anything, and is used to contain nuclear weapons, people, and occasionally entire cities or governments, separating them from the rest of the world (and presumably killing everyone inside by eventual suffocation and lack of sunlight).
In an effort to retain their monopoly on this weapon, they make technological progress illegal, and their power and fear of rebellion corrupts them. In this world, governments are weak, where they are permitted at all; the Peace Authority is the true bearer of power and becomes a worldwide government. A group of rebels, the Tinkers, develop technology clandestinely far beyond what the Authority has (while limited to riding horseback and other Authority-mandated anachronisms), but still has no defense against the bobble. One of the original inventors of the bobble is part of the resistance, and he develops a more advanced version of the bobbler which does not require the huge electrical power sources available only to the Peace Authority.
It is discovered by the Tinkers (and much later by the Peace Authority) that the bobbles are actually not force fields, but stasis fields; within which time has stopped. So not only are the contents perfectly preserved, but they open spontaneously after a certain time period. The Tinkers use their knowledge and the Peacers' ignorance of this effect to their advantage (bobbling themselves for short time periods, for instance), and with the help of a young thief (and mathematical genius), they lead a rebellion to try to bobble the power generators of the Peace Authority and thus neutralize its primary weapon.