Timescape has an unusually large cast of important characters for a science fiction novel but each is so well differentiated that few readers will have trouble telling them apart. Of particular interest in the 1963 segment of the novel, which is mostly set at the University of California-La Jolla, is the physicist Gordon Bernstein, a lightly fictionalized version, one assumes, of Gregory Benford himself. Bernstein, like Benford, is an easterner who has never quite gotten used to the California lifestyle. A brilliant man, he is nonetheless a sort of permanent outsider, an aggravating yet endearing combination of cockiness and self-doubt. In the 1998 section of the novel, set primarily at Cambridge, England, Ian Peterson stands out. Peterson is a government bureaucrat of the sort who appears in simpler form as a villain in many of Benford's novels.

In Timescape he is in many ways a despicable person, a misogynist, a...