Title: Timeline
Author: Michael Crichton
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 496
Rating: 3.5/5
This is quite a strange little read because it mixes together a few different genres. When you first start out, you think it’s going to be a science fiction novel, and then about a third of the way through, it suddenly switches to historical fiction.
That’s because it uses multiverse theory and quantum computing to create a story in which a bunch of scientists, historians and scholars need to go on a rescue mission. The problem is that the middle ages were a scary place, and there’s a lot of danger there. In fact, a few of the rescuers literally kick the bucket as soon as they arrive.
This inauspicious start is soon followed by everything from jousting to a full-scale battle, and it’s interesting to see how quickly the modern people are able to adapt to their new lives, although it helps that they’re well-educated in the languages and customs. One of them even had regular broadsword lessons, which is arguably the only reason why they didn’t all die.
You might think from this description that it’s super exciting and fast-paced, which it was, but there was just something missing from it that left me not actually caring too much about what happened once the rescue mission began. I think I found it more interesting to read about the past when they were looking back at it and investigating it abstractly than when they were actually plunged into the middle of it.
I said in my video review that I think it’s because it started out being all about ideas, which is one of the main things that I always enjoy in books, and then it shifted to become all about the plot and the characters. That can be nice from time to time, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for here and it also wasn’t what the start of the book led me to believe I was in for.
Still, I did enjoy reading it as a whole, and I’m glad that it’s another Michael Crichton novel ticked off. It was also interesting in that Crichton is usually known for his science fiction and so it was cool to see him taking on a new genre while still sticking to his roots. He did a reasonably good job of it, and the sci-fi stuff was super cool even though the actual science was more pseudoscience than anything that could actually happen.
That is, apart from the quantum computing stuff, because quantum computers are already being built. It’s just that they’re not going to allow us to travel through time or to visit parallel universes. Come to think of it, I never did figure out how travelling to a parallel universe enabled the characters to travel through time in the first place. I’m not sure Crichton ever explained that, but you know how it is.
