Basically, like every hit show that's based on a good and appealing story (likely to have good ratings) they tend to stretch it to an endless parade of boring episodes, in a hope of making it profitable for the longest time possible. And a TV show that should have been produced as a mini-series of 4 or 5  episodes or a one-season only of 10 really good episodes, is bound to be filled with  a lot of boring stories that do not contribute in anyway to the central plot line. Good thing I decided to read the book in which the TV show is based upon.

Robert J. Sawyer's FlashForward tells the story of a phenomenon that occurred in 2009, caused by the deployment of the LHC particle accelerator at CERN, that "transports" the entire world's population's consciousness into the future, more particularly 21 years, during more or less 2 minutes. The first interesting aspect of the book is that it was in fact written 10 years ago and it's amazing how the author was able to predict at that time, that in 2009, the launch of the LHC (whose goal was to reproduce part of the behavior of the Big Bang) was going somehow to have an impact on the society. Well, we don't know exactly if its launch is going to allow us to see the future, because they've been having some problems down at CERN. But I doubt it :)

Another interesting aspect is the fact that in the book the flashforward is of 21 years instead of the 6 months on the TV show. I think the 21 years are more appropriate because it reveals real change in people. Most people don't go through significant changes in their lives in 6 months, which is actually a weak point of the TV show in which most of the characters have completely different lives in the future.

But what I really loved about the book is the fact that it's not meant to be a thriller or mystery-related book and it's not pretentious in that way. Instead, it uses simple human stories to encourage the discussion of what would it be like if we actually went through an experience like that, in which we could witness our very own future for 2 minutes, 21 years in advance.

In the TV show, the story is centered on the FBI agents responsible to investigate the causes behind the phenomenon while having also to face their own futures (which were obviously not very friendly). The show even goes as far as touching the possibility that there's some sort of conspiracy behind it or that the whole thing is a well-planned terrorist attack from a few people with an unknown agenda.

In the book, the story is centered on the physicists that are responsible for the phenomenon, which is caused by the LHC. So, there's no mystery, the causes are known and there's no need to build up a conspiracy behind it. Instead, the focus of the book is on the people, their futures and how they'll deal with what they saw. And that's why it's so good. It makes us think about the whole thing: is this really the future? Can it be changed? Or the fact that we know it, will actually embark us on a path that will inevitably leads us to the seen future?

And most of all how would society as a whole deal with this? This leads to an endless stream of interesting questions:

The book does raise a lot of these questions and dwells into them with magnificent speculation, just enough to make you think. But the main focus of the book are on the stories of the main characters: