I think Benford's idea in Timescape was to present a scientific puzzle from the perspective of working scientists, which was something not done before. I think that he largely succeeds with that by managing to include academic politics, a struggle for funding, disinterested grad students, personality conflicts, the effect on family relationships of obsessions with work, and sensationalist news media. All of that does detract from the tachyon-pulses-as-communication-to-the-past hard science fiction idea, and most of the characters, while interesting, are unlikeable; some very unlikeable indeed.
Having said that, I didn't find it at all hard-going. I enjoyed many of the character interactions. I didn't feel that Gordon deserved Penny, and although they married in the future, they had split up, proving his mother correct. The misogynist, haughty, Ian Peterson does get a kind of comeuppance in the original future. For all his political power and wealth, he was left alone with his sick, aging parents, without a partner; a prisoner within the house he had fortified, with insufficient food supplies, for what looked like very few remaining days anyway. Ironically, he is the one person, without whom, nothing would have changed.
I thought that the conclusions in 1963 that the signals could only be from an alien civilisation in space, or that Gordon himself was a fraud, was very realistic.
The ending could be better, but it has dated with time passing. Obviously, written in 1980, Benford thought he had now brought the story full circle. Reading it now, you want to see what the future characters did in the alternative timeline that was created after 1979.
I'm not sure that the paradox works myself. These things are capable of giving head-aches but I wondered why Ian Peterson could find the note in the bank vault if the timeline had now been changed. It was suggested in the book that the note did not change anything at all; that it was only the prevention of the assassination of Kennedy that changed the future, but surely it was giving the chemical and biological information on the algal blooms to the past that made any changes capable of preventing the ecological disaster. Since those were some of the very first messages uncovered, then the nexus for timelines must have occurred earlier.
