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.