“‘You have the advantage of your knowledge. You know the site, and you know the time, in detail. You know languages and customs.’
‘But our knowledge is academic,’ Chris said.
‘Not anymore,’ Doniger said.”
TITLE—Timeline
AUTHOR—Michael Crichton
PUBLISHED—1999
PUBLISHER—Alfred A. Knopf
GENRE—archaeology/historical/techno fantasy
SETTING—New Mexico & France
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—archaeology, quantum theory (Multiverse) & quantum mechanics, “time travel”, rescue mission quest trope, medieval France, architecture, medieval science & technology, fast-paced, all quite dull white cis-hetero characters unfortunately…
WRITING STYLE—it was fine; appropriate for the genre
CHARACTERS—only one character had any sort of an arc & at the end I was very confused about what differentiated the good guys from the bad guys & I totally thought two of the good guys were like double agents or something bc they were written so vaguely… & two other characters’ arcs made no sense. & there were zero interesting characters from the 14th c…
STORY/PLOT—★—this, unfortunately, was the book’s weakest point—there were absolutely no plot twists at the end; literally everything I thought was like too obvious to be all that happened was literally all that happened. So that was very sad. Tragically predictable for the potential this story had imo.
“Watching them go, Bellin clucked his tongue. ‘Ah, dear, dear. It is so difficult to trust these days.’”
IMAGINATION & WORLDBUILDING—★ ★ ★ ★ ★—*standing ovation* this was the book’s strongest point—absolutely fantastic, really well done. Literally the only thing keeping me interested in this story.
BONUS ELEMENT/S—shoutout to my boy Hugh Everett! #CadwellTurnbullReadalong #iykyk
PHILOSOPHY—★ ★ ★—I think it might have been ok? I liked the author’s acknowledgments comment but… idk it could have gone a lot harder…? basically I couldn’t really tell if we were for or against all the capitalism in the book, like, at times it seemed like Crichton is assuming we’re all on the same page about it but then he also doesn’t really critique it at all he just presents it as the bad guys’ whole shtick? so… I really don’t know. 🤷🏻
PREMISE—Think Jurassic Park but with medieval European archaeology & quantum mechanics instead of paleontology & bioengineering—which is a really good premise but it needed a stronger plot & more complex characters…
EXECUTION—★ ★ ★
“As the Professor left, Marek said, ‘I pray God look with favor upon your journey and deliver you safe back.’ That was what he always said to departing friends. It had been a favorite phrase of the Count Geoffrey de la Tour, six hundred years before.”
My thoughts:
I read this book for the #ArchaeoBookclub & basically binged it on audiobook in one day to be ready for the chat. I liked Marek. I loved all the exposition the science & the history & literally every single detail of the worldbuilding was *mwah* to me but it definitely felt like an *incredibly* nerdy book like it was sooo much of those things where if that’s not your thing you would hate it. 😂
↓ ↓ ↓ SPOILERS ↓ ↓ ↓
My main issues were that Johnston & Kate totally seemed like they were getting set up to be secret villains or double agents or something & that Marek was very much written to make it sound like he was originally from the 14th century. Chris was so weasely I thought he was going to like be the one that dies towards the end of the book but yet he was the only one that got any kind of character arc? We never find out why Taub was there or Dekalb even? Did D send T back? How did T’s device drop him in the desert? I totally thought Olivier was going to be the guy from the present… Also Gordon & Kramer were just as, if not *more,* guilty/responsible as Doniger so they should have at least shared his fate (but apparently they were redeemed somehow? somewhere? that I missed?) & speaking of Doniger’s fate that was WAY too harsh. So I’m just very confused about who the bad guys were & why the good guys were the good guys. *beat* I mean HOW was Johnston not the villain, seriously? And Marek really wasn’t originally from the 14th c.?? Seriously!? Also the animal cruelty in this book wasn’t cute.
↑ ↑ ↑ END SPOILERS ↑ ↑ ↑
I don’t know I guess overall I was disappointed that the plot wasn’t more twisty & that the characters weren’t more complex & realistic because I think if they had been this could have been really excellent.
I would recommend this book to readers who love a fast-paced historical / techno fantasy with lots of scientific, archaeological, & historical tangents, descriptions, & explanations with very uncomplicated characters & plot. Basically if you’re a Dan Brown fan you’ll probably like this too. This book is best read at your leisure, I probably would have enjoyed stretching out my time with it a bit more than I did. I did enjoy the audiobook though.
Final note: I do suspect that the more knowledge you have of things like quantum theory, physics, archaeology, & 14th century France the more you might get distracted by the minutiae that doesn’t add up unless you’re really good at just accepting a book for what it is.
“Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.”
★ ★ ★
CW // animal cruelty, graphic medieval-style violence & gore
Season: pool-/beach-side season
Music pairing: John Williams
Further Reading—
the ‘All Souls Trilogy’, by Deborah Harkness
the ‘Convergence Saga’, by Cadwell Turnbull
JURASSIC PARK by Michael Crichton
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT by Mark Twain
THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown
The Mummy Returns (2001 film)
I earn commissions from the sponsored links to my shop on bookshop.org which allow me to keep my content like Book Reviews & Reading Lists free to all subscribers. <3
Selected Quotes—
Introduction: Science at the End of the Century:
“Quantum technology flatly contradicts our common sense ideas of how the world works. It posits a world where computers operate without being turned on and objects are found without looking for them.”
Part 1 - Corazón
“The quondam phone made me roam… Niobium may cause opprobrium. Hairy singularities don’t permit parities… Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel!”
“Quantum foam… At very small, subatomic dimensions, the structure of space-time is irregular. It’s not smooth, it’s sort of bubbly and foamy. And because it’s way down at the quantum level, it’s called quantum foam.”
“TechGate employees put up with the tantrums of “Death March Doniger” because he was a brilliant physicist, better than they were; because he knew the problems his teams were facing; and because his criticisms were invariably on point. Unpleasant as it was, this stinging style worked; TechGate made remarkable advances in two years.”
“All’s fair, Diane. Business is business.”
Part 2 - Dordogne
Epigraph: “The glory of the past is an illusion. So is the glory of the present.” EDWARD JOHNSTON
“Johnston did not change his manner; he simply gave the reporter his undivided attention. He conveyed the impression that there was nothing in the world more important than she was.”
“You never know, Miss Delvert, what someone’s reasons are.”
“‘If I knew ITC wanted Disneyland, I’d never have agreed.’
‘We don’t want Disneyland.’
‘If you rebuild now, that’s what you’ll get, Ms. Kramer. You’ll get a fantasy. Medieval Land.’”
“Marek replied, ‘No, no, I mean it is not fashionable in my time.’ By which he meant the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Many medieval scholars could read old languages, but Marek could speak them: Middle English, Old French, Occitan, and Latin. He was expert in the fine points of period dress and manners. And with his size and athletic prowess, he set out to master the martial skills of the period. After all, he said, it was a time of perpetual war. Already he could ride the huge Percherons that had been used as destriers, or warhorses. And he was reasonably skilled at jousting, having spent hours practicing with the spinning tournament dummy called the quintain. Marek was so good with a longbow that he had begun to teach the skill to the others. And now he was learning to fight with a broadsword. But his detailed knowledge of the past put him oddly out of touch with the present.”
“’Do you need aspirin?’ That was one of their established code phrases, a way to ask if something was wrong, in case the other person couldn’t speak freely.”
“He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it. Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored. The modern world was compelling and new, and the past had no bearing on it. Studying history was as pointless as learning Morse code, or how to drive a horse-drawn wagon. And the medieval period—all those knights in clanking armor and ladies in gowns and pointy hats—was so obviously irrelevant as to be beneath consideration. Yet the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation-states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love had first been established in medieval times.”
“The stock trader continued, pushing in the stubborn way that some people did when confronted with their own ignorance: ‘Really? England used to own part of France? That doesn’t make any sense. The English and French have always hated each other.’
‘Not always,’ Marek said. ‘This was six hundred years ago. It was a completely different world. The English and French were much closer then. Ever since soldiers from Normandy conquered England in 1066, all the English nobility were basically French. They spoke French, ate French food, followed French fashions. It wasn’t surprising they owned French territory. Here in the south, they had ruled Aquitaine for more than a century.’
‘So? What was the war about? The French decided they wanted it all for themselves?’
‘More or less, yes.’”
“The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn’t flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems—of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren’t separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn’t a location, you can’t travel to it.”
“[Quantum theory] gets confirmed, over and over. It’s the most proven theory in the history of science. Supermarket scanners, lasers and computer chips all rely on quantum mechanics. So there is absolutely no doubt that quantum theory is the correct mathematical description of the universe.”
Part 3 - Blackrock
“Their advantage is unimaginably great power—so great that you can indeed describe and compress a three-dimensional living object into an electron stream. Exactly like a fax. You can then transmit the electron stream through a quantum foam wormhole and reconstruct it in another universe. And that’s what we do. It’s not quantum teleportation. It’s not particle entanglement. It’s direct transmission to another universe.”
“You don’t feel a thing. Nerve conduction time from skin to brain is on the order of a hundred milliseconds. Laser vaporization is five nanoseconds. You’re long gone.”
“…several specially burned nav wafers. These wafers had entered the mythology of the company, including their names: Tunguska, Vesuvius, Tokyo. The Vesuvius wafer put you on the Bay of Naples at 7: 00 a.m. on August 24, A.D. 79, just before burning ash killed everyone. Tunguska left you in Siberia in 1908, just before the giant meteor struck, causing a shock wave that killed every living thing for hundreds of miles. Tokyo put you in that city in 1923, just before the earthquake flattened it. The idea was if word of the project became public, you might end up with the wrong wafer on your next trip out.”
“There are no time paradoxes… The so-called time paradoxes,” Doniger said, “do not really involve time. They involve ideas about history that are seductive but wrong. Seductive, because they flatter you into thinking you can have an impact on the course of events. And wrong, because of course, you can’t… Of course, great masses of people can ‘change the course of history.’ But one person? No.”
Part 4 - Castelgard
“There’s no ambient noise here: no radio or TV, no airplanes, no machinery, no passing cars. In the twentieth century, we’re so accustomed to hearing sound all the time, the silence feels creepy.”
“…a clear demarcation between the relatively small areas of human habitation—towns and fields—and the surrounding forest, a dense, vast green carpet, stretching away in all directions. In this landscape, the forest predominated. She had the sense of encompassing wilderness, in which human beings were interlopers. And minor interlopers at that.”
“‘…but it means the end of a whole way of life—a whole culture, really,’ Marek said. ‘Knights are all nobility; their way of life is too expensive for commoners. A knight has to buy his armor and at least three warhorses, and he has to support his retinue of pages and aides. And these noble knights have been the determining factor in warfare, until now. Now it’s over.’ He pointed to the archers in the field. ‘Those men are commoners. They win by coordination and discipline. There’s no personal valor. They’re paid a wage; they do a job. But they’re the future of warfare—paid, disciplined, faceless troops. The knights are finished.’”
“Nearly everyone in this world was young…”
“…the arguments among the graduate students sitting around the long table: whether processual archaeology was primarily historical or primarily archaeological, whether formalist criteria outweighed objectivist criteria, whether derivationist doctrine concealed normative commitment. It was no wonder they argued. The issues were pure abstractions, consisting of nothing but thin air—and hot air. Their empty debates could never be resolved; the questions could never be answered. Yet there had been so much intensity, so much passion in those debates. Where had it come from? Who cared? He couldn’t quite remember now why it had been so important. The academic world seemed to be receding into the distance, vague and gray in memory, as he made his way down the dark hillside toward the river. Yet however frightened he was on this night, however tense and at risk of his life, it was entirely real in some way that was reassuring, even exhilarating…”
“He remembered how Marek’s intensity had always amused the other graduate students—‘Can you imagine? He really believes this chivalry shit!’—and how they had assumed his behavior was some kind of weird posturing. A role he was playing, an affectation. Because in the late twentieth century, you couldn’t seriously ask other people to think that you believed in honor and truth, and the purity of the body, the defense of women, the sanctity of true love, and all the rest of it. But apparently, André really had believed it.”
“‘…this is Christmas Day, 1778, on the Delaware River, where—‘
‘I can’t see shit,’ Doniger said.
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is a bit dark. It’s a night crossing. But we thought George Washington crossing the Delaware would be a good—‘
‘George Washington? Where is George Washington?’
‘He’s right there,’ the kid said, pointing to the screen.
‘Where?’
‘There.’
‘He’s that guy huddled in the back of the boat?’
‘That’s correct, and—‘
‘No, no, no,’ Doniger said. ‘He has to be standing in the bow, like a general.’
‘I know that’s the way the paintings portray him, but it’s not what actually happened. Here you see the real George Washington as he actually crossed the—‘
‘He looks seasick,’ Doniger said. ‘You want me to show a video of George Washington looking seasick?’
‘But this is reality.’
‘Fuck reality,’ Doniger said, throwing one of their videotapes across the room. ‘What’s the matter with you people? I don’t care about reality. I want something intriguing, something sexy. You’re showing me a walking corpse and a drowned rat.’”
Acknowledgments
“…the conception of a brutal medieval period was an invention of the Renaissance, whose proponents were at pains to emphasize a new spirit, even at the expense of the facts, …because it confirms a cherished contemporary belief—that our species always moves forward to ever better and more enlightened ways of life. This belief is utter fantasy…”