Time Pressure

A novel about a one-way time-traveling woman who arrives in 1970's hippie country of rural New Brunswick. The novel is unashamedly hippie-esque, full of free love, back-to-basics lifestyles and New Age pseudo-mystics.

Unlike most of Robinson's other stuff (especially, for example, Telempath) the characters seem to grow a bit, but I still found this odd - uneven, I guess. The protagonist seems a bit too pre-emptively hostile to the time-traveler's agenda, and I was really disturbed by the revelation that she had withheld that agenda from him, while still confiding in just about everyone else, even though she was portrayed as both good and emotionally involved with him.

The late revelation of the reason why he had abandoned society seemed to entirely deny the character that had been built and seemed to jarringly conflict with itself. If he's a hippie, living the back-to-basics life, then fine. But if he's hiding from a self-imposed sense of guilt over the death/murder of a previous girlfriend, then he would NOT have embraced back-to-basics. Instead, he would have been using that as a camoflage, but inside, he'd have been eaten alive by his guilt/memories AND CONSEQUENTLY, THEY WOULD NOT BE COMING AS A SURPRISE TO THE READER AT THE END OF THE BOOK.

I am also a bit disappointed that Spider is re-using his schticks from the Callahan books, about the search for telepathy/empathy, the near-telepathic group mind of good sex/music/chanting, and the conceit that, once again, his protagonist is a guy ducking from guilt over other people's deaths, and is a hermit-like, super-competent musician who just likes to jam. Doesn't this guy have any other characters?