Time Debt I: The Charge of the Light Brigade.

I just finished reading The One-Eyed Man, by L. E. Modessit.  It's a hard SF* concept novel that unfortunately never quite captured my interest.  I've had this problem with some of Modessit's writing before - Modessit writes well, but sometimes his characters seem to be driven by motivations that are never quite clear to me, for whatever reason.

In addition, there was a fundamental aspect of the plot which just didn't make sense to me.  The protagonist is an ecologist who has just undergone a bad divorce, in which both his wife and his daughter have done their best to strip him of all his money and possessions.  As such, he leaps at the opportunity to undertake a lucrative government contract to investigate possible ecological misbehaviour by colonists on another planet.

The contract is even more appealing to the ecologist because the round trip will involve a time debt of 150 years. The flight to the colony will only take a month of ship time, but 75 years will pass in the sidereal universe, and when he finally returns after another 75 years of time warp, both his ex-wife and daughter will be long dead.

Okay, wait - 150 years?  What possible authority could a government exert over a colony whose conduct would take 225 years to punish?  (150 years for someone to find out what the colony is doing and return with the news, and another 75 years to send a message back saying "Bad colonists!  No cookie!").

For that matter, wouldn't 225 years be more than enough time to perpetuate an irreversible ecological catastrophe?  As an example, imagine applying the same timeline to something like the American Revolution of 1776. The message from Great Britain telling everyone to just settle down a bit and not do anything rash would have arrived in 2001.

Or maybe Imperial Britain would have sent an expeditionary force when they received the news in 1926 - not sure that squadrons of post-WWI British cavalry would do well against Abrams Main Battle Tanks and Apache helicopters.

- Sid

* "Hard" science fiction relies heavily on scientific concepts.  It's not called that because it's especially difficult, although some of it isn't all that easy, either.