Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 2 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Nobel-hungry physicists conducting an unimaginably high-energy experiment accidentally induce a global consciousness shift: in an instant, everyone on Earth is “flashed forward” 21 years, experiencing several minutes of the future. But while everyone is, literally, out of their minds, their bodies drop unconscious; when the world reawakens, car wrecks, botched surgeries, falls, and other mishaps add up to massive death and destruction. Slowly, as recovery efforts continue, people realize that during the Flashforward (as it comes to be called) they experienced a vision of the future.

My latest read is Robert J. Sawyer’s “Flashforward” which inspired the short-lived ABC television series of the same name. I never watched that series but heard that the original novel was pretty good. The idea of everyone on the planet seeing two minutes of their future and how they would react to that was an intriguing concept and I wasn’t let down.

The majority of the story takes place at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Physicists Lloyd Simcoe and Theo Procopides are running an experiment which they hope will produce the Higgs boson. Instead, the moment their experiment begins, everyone blacks out and has visions of themselves as much older people. When the CERN scientists regain consciousness they realize that a lot of accidents occurred during the blackout (cars crashes, people falling down stairs, etc.) and eventually discover that it wasn’t just CERN and the surrounding countryside that blacked out, but the entire planet! As news reports begin to come in it becomes clear that everyone had a vision of the same point in the future, which is eventually pinpointed as October 21, 2030.

Except not everyone had visions of the future. Some people were asleep at that point in the future and saw only their dreams. To others, the flashforward event was just an instantaneous blip, not a 2-minute glimpse into their future. It is assumed those people are dead by 2030, and Theo Procopides is one of the vision-less. While part of the novel continues to deal with the after-effects of the flashforward, part of it is now a murder mystery as Theo begins to investigate the strange circumstances around his death. Meanwhile, CERN wants to try and replicate the experiment, hoping to give humanity another glimpse of the future … but is the experiment worth repeating?

Like any good time-travel story, the other continuous theme of the novel is about the visions of the future. Is our future fixed, or do we have free will and thus can change the future that was seen during the Flashforward?

I enjoyed “Flashforward,” although the end left me a little wanting (it seemed a little rushed and there was a plot element introduced near the end that I wanted to explore more). I’ll probably rent the TV series from Netflix, even though it’s apparently nothing like the book (and was cancelled after just one season).