Timeline by Michael Crichton

I realized I have a tendency to set unrealistic expectations for myself when it comes to my writing, and this blog is no exception. I read over my past entries and I feel like I don't express my full thoughts about whatever piece I've just worked my way through. I think the solution is that I need to push myself to go deeper than just a "oh hey how fun was this book" kind of review but not get down on myself when it doesn't read like some of the analyses I wrote for my film or English classes. I guess I'm still just refining my style of writing for this blog.

That being said, I just finished reading Michael Crichton's Timeline, and I can assuredly say that the man had his own distinct style. I've read six books by him in my lifetime (some of them recently for the second time) and he by no means has created a full-fledged sub-genre, but you definitely know what to expect when you're reading one of his books, but I'll save this discussion for a later date. Timeline is of particular interest to me for two reasons. The first of those is that Crichton's works have always been a part of my life, being that they're the first adult pieces of fiction I ever read. Though this is my first time through Timeline, I do have fond memories of going to see the film adaptation in high school with my two best friends one day after high school.

The other reason is that I'm intrigued by the notion of working time travel into a piece of fiction in a way that isn't completely riddled with plot discrepancies the size of a super-massive black hole. I think the idea of being able to interact with or change another period of time is something that has always piqued humanity's interest, even before we had the words to describe it. That's why time travel is such a popular trope sometimes in science fiction. To me, there's really only two ways that you can go about it. One is the less is more approach, in which you would try to explain as little as possible about your time traveling methods while still making them seem plausible. This leaves more to the imagination and less holes in the plot. The other method should be quite obvious - this is where the writer tries to make time travel seem actually believable by providing a lot of scientific terms and explanations.

Crichton's Timeline falls somewhere in the middle, for better or worse. He provides a lot of seemingly plausible real-world explanations for why time travel would be possible. It's actually done in a way that is pretty innovative as far as science fiction time travel goes. Early time travel stories such as H.G. Wells' popular novel simply utilized machines or vehicles that could take a time traveler forward and backward through time, because the authors visualized time as a linear progression (because that's how humans experience it). As the concept of the vehicle/machine became less believable and, well, scientific knowledge itself advanced, so did methods of envisioning time travel in fiction. Concepts like the wormhole came into play. The wormhole still utilized the linear time world-view, but this time it also made use of a (theoretically) existent physical anomaly.

Timeline tries to fuse the two methods. There are still wormholes, there are still fantastic machines capable of transporting objects and organisms across time and space. But this time, Crichton makes interesting use of quantum mechanics and the multi-verse theory. He acknowledges that time might not (and probably isn't) a linear progression of events and that causes and effects might not necessarily be related in the simple way that we think that they are. In his novel, time travelers don't necessarily travel back in time. They are actually traveling to a different universe, one of an infinite possible number of universes. The machines are apparently capable of controlling when and where (in terms of universes) that the travelers will end up. I think that this method is a step in the right direction for plausible time travel, and I hope to be able to implement it in my own science fiction writing.

But it isn't without it's problems. Timeline draws much of its narrative tension and excitement from the fact that the characters only have a limited window in which they will be able to get back home from their medieval  universe. However, when you establish that time travel is possible and it takes its shape in the form of a machine capable of traveling at will, you run into a problem. This problem is that there's seemingly nothing stopping the characters from traveling back to the time before the events of the novel and avoiding the entire fiasco. If one of the characters is stuck back in time and you have a machine capable of dropping you in that exact universe at any time that you desire, why not just go back in time to five minutes after he got out of the machine and rescue him? If your other friend gets stuck while you're making your escape at the end of the novel, why not just go back in time right after you leave and pick him up? I guess the answer to this is that if you did that, it wouldn't be a very exciting novel, or really a novel at all. But if, as an author, you're going to go to the trouble of constructing a rather plausible model for time traveling, why not go the distance and enforce your own rules or at least attempt to explain the inevitable holes in the plot that occur when time travel is involved? While this wasn't necessarily a deal-breaker for me, I felt like this aspect of the novel could have been much better.

Another aspect of the novel other than the time travel that I found interesting was Crichton's attitude towards history. Timeline contains the typical Crichton diatribes against academic and corporate attitudes, this time directed towards academic discussions of theory. Crichton seems to think that it's, for lack of a better phrase, all complete bullshit, and that discussions of theory will only get you so far, because, well, you have to actually apply your theories to the real world. He discusses these things in the context of academic and civilian attitudes towards history. He notes that we all have our own preconceived notions of how the world was in the past (for example, that because we're so advanced now, the past must have been awfully primitive) but he believes that we actually don't know anything about the past. To conjecture otherwise is a grave mistake. I like this approach to portraying a historical world. Respect the past and hope to learn from it, don't talk about it condescendingly.

I realize that I've focused quite heavily on just one or two aspects of the novel. However, this is simply because I don't really feel the need to elaborate on any other aspect. It was pretty run-of-the-mill, other than that. The characters kind of ran together and sometimes their motivations were suspect. Why would Andre choose to stay back in 14th century France with the obviously treacherous Lady Claire? Maybe I just read through it too quickly but it seemed like she was slightly contradictory as a character. At any rate, beside the time travel and historical discussions, Timeline is a moderately exciting novel. The characters are sympathetic and the action is exciting enough, though the prose does have a tendency to get repetitive when the characters are constantly fighting their way from point A to point B with little context provided as to why. All in all, I found it to be a good read and an inspiration for my own writing.

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

I actually read this book a couple of months ago, before I revived this blog, so my grasp of the plot and its details is going to be a little loose. Once I go back to review a lot of the books and films and video games that I've experienced in the past two years, I'm going to run into that problem again and again. For this particular work, however, it's okay - because I don't really have anything bad to say about it.

I went into Eaters of the Dead knowing full-well that it was a retelling of Beowulf. I can't imagine what it would have felt like to read it and not know it, and then to finally realize that it was (I'm sure it wasn't an Earth-shattering revelation, but it probably would have been pretty cool). Crichton alludes in the end notes that this novel was more or less conceived on a bet that he couldn't make one of the old "classics" interesting to read to a modern audience. He picked Beowulf, and he succeeded.
The characters are engaging, the action scenes are well-constructed and the fear of the protagonist as he travels with these barbarous vikings is palpable. His change from cowardly merchant to budding warrior is believable and exciting to read.

The format is what does it for me, though. Written in the style of a false document, the story is taken from the "journals" of a Middle-Eastern merchant as he travels throughout the continent, eventually being taken on by a group of Nordic warriors. Inevitably, he goes with them to confront a group of "monsters" and their "queen", meant to be Grendel and her followers, but explained by Crichton in his in-world notes as a group of relict Neanderthals. Even though techniques like this may have the tendency to come off as some sort of gimmick, a la "Beowulf the history book", I think that if it's done properly it can really enhance a work. The first example that jumps into my pop culture-addled mind is the "documents" that come in between chapters of Alan Moore's Watchmen. At times these in-universe documents can really help with character development and emotional resonance. The pirate comic book in Watchmen is a great example of this, but my favorite is the Rolling Stone-style interview with Ozymandias before the final chapter of the novel.

While Crichton's adaptation of Beowulf isn't quite as epic as Watchmen, it definitely succeeds in revitalizing a more or less "old and boring" classic. The false document style can even be seen as a commentary on the work that Crichton himself is commenting on. By writing a novel about an academic analysis of a merchant's mysterious northern expedition and it's anthropological implications, Crichton is reemphasizing that the classics are important, even if they need a little dusting off and polishing every once in a while.

The Lost World by Michael Crichton

I'm not sure what to say about Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park. I'm not sure there was really a point to the Lost World, other than to make some more money by providing some entertaining albeit more-of-the-same dinosaur-related action.The moral imperative from the first novel, that being the idea that man shouldn't attempt to "play God" and meddle in the affairs of nature, has all but disappeared. I don't recall any of the same diatribes against unregulated genetic research that the first book was filled with, which doesn't leave the Lost World with any real anchor in the real world. Yes, there's plenty of interesting discussion about evolution and extinction and chaos theory and plenty of jabs against the common man and his lack of scientific or historical knowledge, but all those paths were tread by the first novel. Even the protagonist, Ian Malcolm, by far the preachiest of the characters from the first novel, has nothing more to say about the events of the first novel. In fact, he barely seems to remember it. He actually seems rather eager to go to this other island conveniently shoe-horned into the Jurassic Park canon to find himself some more dangerous dinosaurs to go toe-to-claw with.

I guess it kind of sounds like I didn't like this novel. That's not true at all, actually. I liked it for the same reason I like Crichton's other novels. It's compelling science fiction, with plenty of action and enough facts fabricated or pulled from the real world to make it all seem somewhat believable. It's just that this one didn't seem at all necessary.