“In an Arizona desert, a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. Halfway around the world, archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology. Now this group is about to get a chance not to study the past but to enter it. And with history opened up to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survival -- six hundred years ago.”
I kind of suspected that Timeline would be just another variation on his own Jurassic Park. I mean, here we have a company called ITC, a generically named one at that, which is entirely not an above corporation - ass they’ve secretly built the world’s first quantum computer. In Jurassic Park, we had a generically, and not completely above the board company named InGen who was secretly cloning dinosaurs. And while both CEO’s are portrayed differently, their end goal is the same: the future of entertainment (which is a dumb, but highly truthful as well).
I’ve mentioned before my fondness for time travel stories, though I full admit I’ve not even read HG Wells, but here we are. Now Crichton tries really hard to explain how time travel can work. Here his explanation comes from existing science, his vehicle being quantum theory and the multiverse, as well as Quantum mechanics, which uses complex mathematics to predict probabilities. For here, time travel is not one single road stretching from the past to our future (to him, there is no past, just now). However, using the many worlds theory, the idea is there are an infinite number of worlds sandwiched together and ITC’s technology can, “fax” for lack of a better word, people into various pasts and not run into paradoxes. Because, in a sense, if I wanted to go and meet my Dad before he died, I could, but it would be in a universe where he never died at 34.
Well that’s the theory of CEO Robert Donager, who is very smart, but also an asshole. Still, he funds archeological digs around the world, including a dig in France at the site of a medieval battle. But when the students working at the dig find a message from their missing professor -a message written over 600 years earlier- they discover that ITC has used their quantum computer to build the after mentioned time machine. And now these students will have to put all of their knowledge of medieval France to the ultimate test as they travel back in time to April 7, 1357, to try to rescue the professor.
I think the book succeeds for its actions sequences, but comes off more so as an overlong adventure tale. And like Jurassic Park, Timeline rings a cautionary bell about the potential of self-serving Big Business to who use science in a horrible way as an instrument of profit for the few at the expense of others.
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