Timescape braids two timelines: La Jolla, California in 1962-63, where physicist Gordon Bernstein is puzzling over strange noise in his tachyon experiments, and Cambridge, England in 1998, where a team of scientists races to warn the past of an ecological catastrophe — runaway algae blooms collapsing the ocean food chain — before it's too late to stop.
The 1998 team, led by Gregory Markham, attempts to send a message backward in time using tachyons, hoping some version of it will be received clearly enough to change history. In 1962, Bernstein slowly realizes the anomalous signals in his data aren't noise at all, and finds himself fighting not just the science but the skepticism of his colleagues and the university's entrenched hierarchies to be taken seriously.
Winner of the 1980 Nebula Award and widely regarded as one of the finest science-in-fiction novels ever written, Timescape is as much about the culture and psychology of scientific work — ambition, doubt, institutional politics — as it is about its central speculative conceit, building to an ending that turns on a quiet, irrevocable divergence in the past.
