Book Review: The World at the End of Time – Frederik Pohl

This is a book review of The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl. Humanity has gone to colonise a planet and the undertaking has been immense, but with impressive technology or capabilities, maturity, compassion and understanding don’t naturally follow. It doesn’t take a genius to realise the ‘the world at the end of time’ is the world humanity is attempting to colonise, but how does this happen and what does this mean for humanity?

The science fiction book is from 1990, but it had the feel of an older sci-fi story, which isn’t a negative, it is a compliment as it stood up on its own two feet, away from the technology and presented a fairly decent story.

This books mainly follows the lives of two beings, one human called Viktor, and Wan-To a plasma based life-form. Discover how Wan-To’s almost childlike outlook causes problems for Viktor, the rest of humanity and Wan-To as well. Wan-To is practically immortal, whereas Viktor who is the underdog of the two uses other means to survive. It is said that with great power, comes great responsibility, but this book at times turned this on its head, and the results laid out across the story were interesting and fun to read.

There are plenty of supporting characters in the book, but I won’t say more abount them, as I don’t want to spoil the read. This book did shows the effects of technological advancement, but the book wasn’t really about technology, but a book about characters.

I’m not going to lie and say this is a must read, or that it is an awesome science fiction book, it isn’t. Yet I enjoyed its honesty, in looking at how selfishness and immaturity can impact life. It shows just because someone has experiences, doesn’t mean they always walk away for the better, matured and can use that knowledge to not repeat errors later on.

Its take on dealing with space travel, the wonder of travelling to the stars, meeting new life-forms and humanity over long periods of time were quite unexpected at times, and interesting to follow. So read this book if you want a good space science fiction read, but for me was more about characters than the settings and technology.

A good science fiction story, that didn’t hold its punches and provided plenty of twists and turns that kept me reading till the end.