496 pages
Published 1999
Read from October 30 to October 31
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
This feels like the end of an era. If Kamala Harris wins, she's positioned herself too far to the right to inspire confidence in any lasting progressive change, but at least the MAGA parasite throttling American politics could be finished (barring some episodic violence here and there). If Trump wins — or, more likely, gets appointed against the will of the electorate by a corrupt Supreme Court and Speaker of the House — America as an idea is over.
Though I didn't know it at the time, Michael Crichton's Timeline also marked the end of an era. It was the last present my grandmother bought me before she died. Less poignantly, it also represents a strain of technological optimism that withered away sometime after the turn of the Millennium, its death hastened by conservative politics and 9/11 and Forever War.
Crichton, in his own small way, helped kill the optimistic future: He would soon abandon his career-long shtick of “thrillers that make normies think they learned something” in favor of conspiracy pap and brainrot. State of Fear, one of the origins of the “Humans can't alter the climate, so evil scientists built a weather machine!” bullshit that reached mainstream audiences after Hurricane Heléne, was published just five years after Timeline. So this book was the end of an era for him, as well.
I remember reading Crichton’s introduction here, which in characteristic fashion spoke of the promise, and the dangers, of the coming quantum technology. A teenager at the time, I imagined a future of quantum miracles: teleportation, multiverses, space exploration, potentially even my personal holy grail, travel into Deep Time. Instead, the last twenty-five years have erected a second Gilded Age, with corporations and Big Tech racing to deregulate, stagnate, profit off consumers, and siphon free money from the government. Instead of anything useful or groundbreaking, they've given us drone strikes, social media, private equity, and rockets that blow up. Perhaps the extremely wealthy might know a future of quantum promise, but we peons certainly won't.
I've avoided rereading Timeline as an adult, in large part because it’s not that good. Crichton wrote exactly one and a half okay books in his long career, and this isn't one of them. Perhaps recognizing this, Crichton conspicuously emulates the plot beats of Jurassic Park, even opening with a middle aged man worried about getting lost on vacation as his wife gives insufficient directions. Crichton then follows the JP blueprint through some medical procedural chapters and some boardroom scenes, and brings us to a dig site funded by the nefarious corporation. Knights perform the role of Velociraptors. Even the end goal is the same: a theme park. It’s basically Jurassic Park from Temu.
Those early portions, spackled over the old Jurassic Park framework, are almost okay, at least by technothriller standards. Once the crack team of grad students is inserted into the multiversal Middle Ages, Crichton’s thriller instincts flail about in self-parody. The medieval times ultraviolence overshoots “thriller” and lands in inadvertent slapstick. There’s a sequence with a pine tree and a cliff face straight out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. The action is soundless, weightless, going through the motions. The plot contrivance that inevitably strands the students in 1357 is particularly silly, as well.
Overall, Timeline is somewhat better than I remembered — and inspired way more of my own fictional time travel mechanics than I realized. It’s still a late period Crichton, though, and about a hundred pages too long, at that.
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