Timeline

Michael Crichton

New York: Random House, 1999. ISBN: 0-345-41762-3. Pp. 496, bibliography

An absorbing thriller that is partly a medieval adventure romance and partly a sci-fi techno conspiracy, Timeline is one of these books that you read in one sitting and then utterly forget the details. Being a Crichton novel, however, squarely puts this one above most of the similar fare, if for nothing else, then for the sheer energy of writing and the meticulously researched medieval background necessary to develop a believable backdrop against which the modern characters can enact their inevitably maladapted prejudices.

A secretive high-tech company called ITC is developing some sort of quantum teleportation device that can move matter between parallel universes. Crichton goes to some lengths justifying the supposedly scientific basis of this fantasy, which is entirely in keeping with the venerable science fiction tradition of dressing all dramatically required but reality-challenged aspects of the plot in vaguely sciensy-sounding mumbo-jumbo. This one comes with footnotes too. A true wonder.

When it comes down to it, however, Crichton is treading where generations of writers and fans have been before. The idea is that there exists an infinite number of parallel realities that differ from ours in some minor or major detail. That is, there's one in which I just misspelled this last word but that in every other respect is identical to ours. Some, of course, are wildly different. The idea is that if we can be reduced to our quanta (whatever that means), we can slip through the cracks and end up in one of these other universes. Well, it's a bit more involved actually because according to Crichton when we are transported, we cease to exist in our world and are then somehow recreated in the other, where our alter ego already exists. I don't know why he felt he needed that bit: perhaps because the universe abhors vacuum or something.

So ITC is developing this technology for some nefarious purpose (I can't disclose what it turns out to be but trust me, you will be laughing your head off when you read it). It has something to do with some anthropological projects involving some digs of a medieval castle in France. When the leader of the team, Professor Johnston disappears during his visit to ITC headquarters, several of his graduate student assistants are summoned to New Mexico, where they are asked to follow the prof into the parallel reality and retrieve the wandering scholar. Why these students and why all of them (most do not speak the medieval dialect), we will never know. They travel "back" to medieval France where they encounter a world radically different from most people's perceptions.

The experiences of the group in medieval France are the best part of the book. They are full of adventure but also wonder because Crichton relishes the opportunity to tell his readers that the medieval world is not the dark age of the image bequeathed to us by the Renaissance. In this, I am entirely in agreement even though some, like William Manchester, might vehemently take exception to. The pervasive violence and disregard for human life is there, but so are some quite unexpected features of that society (e.g., the behavior of some women). It is remarkable how quickly our mild graduate students "degenerate" ("adapt" might be a better word) to deal with the foreign world they have been thrust into. They turn into killers with hardly a hesitation, and one of them likes it so much that he actually stays behind.

If he had kept to the medieval experience part, the thriller would have been nearly faultless. It was the "science" angle that spoiled it for me. In truth, Crichton just isn't very good at tracing the implications of some of his inventions. For example, we are told these are parallel worlds that sometimes interfere with each other on a quantum level but are fundamentally separate as far as we are concerned. You can't just walk into an alternate reality; you need some bad-ass machinery to shrink you, and so forth. And yet, when the Professor is stranded in the parallel world that corresponds closely to our medieval France, he scribbles a message that then ends up in our world's present. Since the professor did not transport the message, the conclusion is that he must have written it in our past, which contradicts the idea that he was in a parallel universe. Ditto for Marek's tomb.

How do the travelers return without a new scan? We are told that to send their data to the other reality, a really powerful quantum computer collects it and compresses it (hopefully using some sort of lossless algorithm, I would not want to end up with a testicle at a lower resolution). But when they return, they push a button, the teleport machine materializes, and they are whisked right back. No fresh scan. They must be getting restored from the backups. But in that case, they would lose all changes resulting from their travel, not just physical (meaning that dying "there" probably cannot cause dying "here") but also psychological. At the very least, they would lose their memory of the experience there.

In addition to this gaps that one can drive more than one quantum through to another universe, Crichton dismisses some questions that people have pondered for a long time (pp. 172-3). In particular, he embraces an anti-individualistic view of history (bordering on Marxism) where any one person simply does not matter; he or she cannot change history. So if you travel back in time and attempt to, say, murder Hitler, you will fail and there will be no paradox. Why would you fail? Because shit happens. That's right. You may be struck by lighting. Or killed by his guard. Or whatever. But that just evades the question. What if I got myself teleported next to Hitler's cradle at night and then crushed his head? Very unlikely that someone would be able to stop me. And will definitely change history. Instead of just glossing over these details, Crichton should have noted that in his parallel world version, the paradox does not exist: these people do not travel to their own past, so the future they are "altering" in not theirs. But then this future does not exist until they "alter" its past, meaning that what they do is part of that world's history: if they kill Hitler there, Hitler would not exist in that other world. We still get our Second World War, unfortunately.

Anyway, these quibbles aside, if one treats the novel as a rollicking medieval romance, it makes for an excellent read. Just skip over the science mumbo-jumbo and the lame attempt to fit the book in the far more sophisticated science fiction genre. The bibliography also gives a nice primer on modern research of the medieval world. If you still think it's a "world lit only by fire," you really owe it to yourself to read about it some more.

January 31, 2006