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May 18, 2006
Timeline
I finished Timeline by Michael Crichton a few days ago, where historians travel back to medieval France to rescue a colleague who is stuck there. It was actually good compared to the other two Crichton books I had listened to recently. Only one Bond villain deathtrap this time and the bad guy at least stayed to supervise it, even if it did not work. The plot was much more complex than the previous two books of his I had read and there were several points that I did not see coming (and several that I did). While the protagonists in his novels continue to disappoint with their lack of personality and uniqueness, Timeline's main hero was an eccentric history professor who felt more alive in the past then in the present day so at least he was interesting. The antagonists in this book were all decently evil, which is always a key point in a good action story. The tech guy who invented the time travel device was the best of the bad guys partly because he was so believable. Crichton introduces a few interesting minor characters like a local Indian reservation police officer who suspects something is not quite right, but drops them from the story once the actual time travel begins. A similar thing happened in State of Fear where the most interesting character (the native helicopter pilot) was not introduced until the last act and then only lasted a brief time.
The science was a bit iffy and seemed to contradict itself, but that is true with pretty much every time travel attempt in fiction, save perhaps Bill & Ted. The history and setting were well done and one of Crichton's strengths is setting stuff in past times and going into lots of detail. All in all not bad and much better than the movie they made out of it. Why do movies change plots of books so much? I can understand changing them if it is an improvement, but the movie version of the book was much less exciting and lacked most of the interesting historical details.
Posted by Pete at May 18, 2006 09:54 PM
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