Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780099244721
ISBN number: 0099244721
Label: Arrow Books Ltd
Manufacturer: Arrow Books Ltd
Page Count: 512
Printing Date: August 03, 2000
Publishing house: Arrow Books Ltd
Sale Popularity Level: 759125
Studio: Arrow Books Ltd
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
An old man wearing a brown robe is found wandering disoriented in the Arizona desert. He is miles from any human habitation and has no memory of how he got to be there, or who he is. The only clue to his identity is the plan of a medieval monastery in his pocket. So begins the mystery of 'Timeline', a mystery that will catapult a group of young scientists back to the Middle Ages and into the heart of the Hundred Years' War. Imagine the risks of such a journey. Imagine the impossible.
Amazon.com Review:
When you step into a time machine, fax yourself through a 'quantum foam wormhole,' and step out in feudal France circa 1357, be very, very afraid. If you aren't strapped back in precisely 37 hours after your visit begins, you'll miss the quantum bus back to 1999 and be stranded in a civil war, caught between crafty abbots, mad lords, and peasant bandits all eager to cut your throat. You'll also have to dodge catapults that hurl sizzling pitch over castle battlements. On the social front, you should avoid provoking 'the butcher of Crecy' or Sir Oliver may lop your head off with a swoosh of his broadsword or cage and immerse you in 'Milady's Bath,' a brackish dungeon pit into which live rats are tossed now and then for prisoners to eat.
This is the plight of the heroes of Timeline, Michael Crichton's thriller. They're historians in 1999 employed by a tech billionaire-genius with more than a few of Bill Gates's most unlovable quirks. Like the entrepreneur in Crichton's Jurassic Park, Doniger plans a theme park featuring artifacts from a lost world revived via cutting-edge science. When the project's chief historian sends a distress call to 1999 from 1357, the boss man doesn't tell the younger historians the risks they'll face trying to save him. At first, the interplay between eras is clever, but Timeline swiftly becomes a swashbuckling old-fashioned adventure, with just a dash of science and time paradox in the mix. Most of the cool facts are about the Middle Ages, and Crichton marvelously brings the past to life without ever letting the pulse-pounding action slow down. At one point, a time-tripper tries to enter the Chapel of Green Death. Unfortunately, its custodian, a crazed giant with terrible teeth and a bad case of lice, soon has her head on a block. 'She saw a shadow move across the grass as he raised his ax into the air.' I dare you not to turn the page!
Through the narrative can be glimpsed the glowing bones of the movie that may be made from Timeline and the cutting-edge computer game that should hit the market in 2000. Expect many clashing swords and chase scenes through secret castle passages. But the book stands alone, tall and scary as a knight in armour shining with blood. --Tim Appelo
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
_Timeline_ is about a handfull of historians who travel back to 14th century France to retrieve a professor who is trapped there. This book is about what I expected: lots of sword play, lots adventure and lots of killing. Not that this is a bad thing, but it gets tedious after a while. The theories of how these individuals manage to travel into the past (millions of parallel worlds, foam worm holes, etc.) is fanciful, but lacks any particular sense of reality. I enjoyed the individual battles at first, and found Chris, a character who had no experience riding horses very brave and rather humorous. Andre, another character, advises Chris that if he fell off a horse while in battle to just lay there and play dead.
I did enjoy reading the descriptions of Castelgard, the book's medieval castle, and the incredible images of those untouched, primevel forests, but eventually grew tired of the various ways discovered of hacking yet another human being to death. Actually, the part of the book I enjoyed reading most was the Afterword. Here, the author discusses the misunderstanding many people have of the middle ages as static and brutal times, when in actuality there were many intellectual and technological advances. My favorite line in the book, in fact, is how the only reality which exists is the past or what is known as history.
Rated by buyers 
-
I couldn't believe it but this is only my second Crichton book! How crazy is that? I was in Goodwill one day (one of the BEST places to find great older books) jamming to music on my iPhone and going through the hardcovers when I saw this book.
I read `Jurassic park' a while back but, like I said earlier, nothing by Michael since then. So I bought it and... well... here I am! A book about time travel going back to the 14th century? Ok, I'll bite. Michael has a true gift for telling a story and his research is stunning! I don't know when the last time was I saw such a large bibliography at the end of a book! The idea of being able to go back in time would be a definite draw for most of us but for someone who actually had the ability, means, and money to make it happen? The drive has to be downright consuming!
Doniger was such a man. Driven, mad, obsessive, brilliant, controlling, dreamer, scientist, CEO, and a real dinglehopper! His companies have developed the tools and means to be able to "travel" to the past. There is a lot of science and nerd-stuff but Michael does a very good job of explaining it without it becoming boring or making you feel stupid. I love authors who can do that. So even though this story was heavy on quantum theories, quantum mechanics, space, time, and disproving theories it DID NOT take away from the story in any way.
My only "complaint" was that it took him about 100 pages to really get into the story. I remember a few years back when Stephen Spielberg was directing `Jurassic Park 2' one of the suggestions he got from people was "get to the dinosaurs faster"!! I felt that way when I read this book. I was like "dude, seriously hurry up and get to the good stuff"! Well he did and the good stuff lasted right up to the last page. I especially loved the chapter before the last chapter. Foreboding and utterly chilling. It's a shame that we lost such a master of this craft we call storytelling, but he left a lot of work for us to enjoy... and I certainly will!
Rated by buyers -
Timeline is an interesting juxtaposition of six-hundred-year-old medieval history and futuristic science fiction. All history and science fiction buffs should go ape over this book, especially if can dig walking around 14th Century Europe during the very first twenty years of the Hundred Years War. Yikes!
In this novel, France and England are hard at it in a series of scattered wars over English possessions in France as well as England's claim, led by Edward III, to the very throne of France. Of course, the French, under Charles IV saw things differently. So when the two opposing forces clash, as Michael Crichton describes so beautifully, the scene explodes into everything you'd expect from such a tumultuous time; knights in shining armor, beautiful maidens, intense sword fighting, violent battles and secret passageways. And, to spice things up a notch, the whole thing takes place right at the tail end of the Black Death that swept through Europe around 1349 decimating the population and causing tremendous economic and social upheavals. Now the kicker. Modern-day time travelers enter the picture, they find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time with no way out except to fight their way back. It's an old fashioned a page turner. I read it in two sittings. I suggest you do the same.
Rated by buyers 
-
Michael Crichton knows how to write a suspenseful book that keeps you on the edge of your seat. But the reader normally expects that the plot will make some sort of sense at the end. A few well-drawn characters would also be a plus. Here the villain is investing billions of dollars in a technology for travel to alternate universes, which just happen to be replaying our past (why this would be so is never explained). Although these are defined as "alternate" universes, somehow someone in that universe is able to leave a message for us in the present at an archaeological site(again, not explained). And while the villain must use elaborate machinery to compress an individual down to his digital essense in order to transmit him along the "quantum foam" into the alternate universe, amazingly enough no machinery is required to recreate the traveler from the digital bits at the other end. Why not? The deus ex machina, of course: as one character "explains," "we happen to have chosen an alternate universe where no machine is required at the other end." What does the villain want to do with this amazing technology in which he has invested billions? Learn something about history? Have people pay multibucks to be sent in to alternate worlds? Nope. He wants to use the historical knowledge he gains to create elaborate historically oriented theme parks in our world, and he's buying up the land around archaeological sites so that he can make money from hotels and restaurants. And, while he's sending people into the past history of one of those sites solely in order to get information needed to recreate archaeological sites for this purpose, the travelers never give the information to the people he's funding to excavate the sites except by accident. Huh? As a result of one such inadvertent disclosure the archaeologist professor in charge of the French site where most of the action takes place goes charging back to the U.S. to confront the billionaire. Somehow, notwithstanding elaborate, multi-level security on the travelling machines, the good professor ends up stranded in the past. No explanation forthcoming. Of course the villain then has to send the archaeologist's team of graduate students into the alternate universe to go rescue him (without warning them that he's left stranded in the same place a former company employee who became a psychopath by riding the quantum foam one too many times). The rest of the novel plays out against this ridiculous, hole-filled scenario. Now that our heroes are back in the past, you'd think we'd get some character development, but no. The one who had previously been obsessed with the past decides to stay there. After getting knocked silly in a tournament and experiencing a few other pain-inducing events, the second male protagonist, a skirt-chasing dilettante, concludes he has never felt as "real" and "authentic" as he does in the past. Since he has thus adequately "matured" he is accepted as a mate by the female graduate student, about whom we learn little. The rest of the plot is just an excuse for a lesson in the history of 14th century France and England, with a lengthy bibliography at the end designed to show us that Crichton is a "serious" writer. The "suspense" in the 14th century has something to do with a hidden passageway into a fortified tower, which everyone is looking for for no apparent reason and which, once it is found, seems to lead to no plot development of any consequence. In sum, if your goal is to get your teenager to learn some history without too much intellectual effort this book is for you. Otherwise, pick up some Barbara Tuchman or for fiction try Connie Willis' Doomsday Book.
Rated by buyers 
-
Admittedly, the science in Timeline is weak in comparison to other Crichton novels. However, I really stopped caring once he took me, convincingly, to the middle-ages. This book is one heck of an exciting adventure! -Stephen Prins, author of: Strife of the Lorin
Find other books like this one:
