I Like The Cut Of Your Jib

You may have watched the new show Flash Forward on ABC and thought to yourself, as i did, “wow who dreams up this stuff?” Well the answer is the first credit shown.  The author Robert J. Sawyer.  Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the novel that inspired the show:

Flash Forward is a science fiction novel by Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer first published in 1999. The novel is set in a fictionalized and overly futuristic year 2009. At CERN, the Large Hadron Collider accelerator is performing a run to search for the Higgs boson. The experiment has a unique side effect: the entire human race loses consciousness for about two minutes. During that time, nearly everyone sees themselves in the future (by about 21 years). Each individual experiences their own future through the senses of their future self. This “flash forward” results in countless deaths and accidents involving vehicles, aircraft, and any other device needing human control at the time of the experiment.

What’s crazy is that while Wikipedia calls it an overly futuristic 2009, it’s not.  Today, CERN is a real particle physics organization in Europe, and guess what they are getting ready to do… Yup, fire up the first Hadron Collider in search of the Higgs particle.  Which means that if they succeed, energy levels will exist here on earth that have not existed since the beginning of time, or so that’s the theory. 

Other’s believe that the Hadron Collider will create a black hole immediately tearing the earth apart.  Still others believe that nothing extraordinary will happen at all.  Most physicists would agree however that whatever the result, this is a huge step in the science of particle physics, and one step closer to Einsteins elusive theory of everything.

But, i digress.  The novel is great, if you can handle the occasional physics chatter that is.  It really stresses the question, “If we caught a glimpse of our future, would we be able to change it, or would our efforts to change it inevitably lead us to the very future we were trying to change?”  Far out stuff i know, but i like thinking outside the box.

I’ll have to give my girlfriend credit for this find.  She started reading this book a couple weeks or so before I decided to get it on audio book to listen to at work (one of the bonuses of being a web designer, I work better with headphones on).  If I had a star system, or thumbs up system…come to think of it, I think I’ll come up with one.  Anyway, if I had a system I would give this book 4 out of a possible 5 stars or whatever.  It was really good.

Set in Germany during WWII, and written from the stand point of Death himself, it follows a little girl growing up in a lower middle class neighborhood, her struggles to conform, and yes her book thieving ways.  The author (Markus Zusak) does a really good job of adding little phrases and imagery that makes you feel like you are really in a WWII German home.

As you can imagine death is a main theme of the book and I will warn you, once you hit the last chapter just go ahead and take a break to grab a box of tissues… you’ll need it.  No joke, I found myself sitting at my desk at work in a room with 7 other people, praying that no one would look over and notice that I was indeed staring at my computer screen with headphones on crying.  Never felt so manly in my entire life.