They were sent to another dimension to a place in the past, so they might just as well have called it time travel. There was action alright, but it never stopped! We never saw relationships develop. They were colleagues, running, hiding, looking for passages, dodging arrows, jumping or falling off cliffs, clinging to trees, crawling through rafters, hanging on for dear life, losing sight of each other, calling out, finding, losing sight, finding again, constantly, and in the end I didn't understand why finding this key and passage was even important. By the time it was near the end I didn't care, I just wanted it to be over. Action in a book can be interesting, but here it was too much,and the story offered nothing else.

Read the book now. Watched the movie much earlier. Although both are above average at best, I will be in the minority when I say I prefer the movie...it had a better storyline and characters were more fleshed out.

Book Andre Marek or movie Andre Marek? Definitely movie Andre Marek...it's Gerard Butler guys!

I zoomed through this book, I just could not put it down!! Cliff hangers abounded at the end of chapters & I eagerly kept turning the pages. So a sci-fi time travel story that turned into a swashbuckling adventure ala the old Errol Flynn movies. Wha..??? you say. It's even crazier when you mix quantum technology that enables one to go back in time, in this case to 1357 France. Since I read Dark Matter, I felt I had a handle on a lot of the quantum lingo for a non-scientist, and knew about multiverses or parallel universes, but this put a whole new spin on the theory for me. And who knew what quantum foam was before reading this?
Another reviewer made the connection with Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Yet that was light and fun. This had all the horrors, gore, death, deception & shifting alliances of Game of Thrones, but it was fun too. So what is it about? In simplest terms, it's a rescue mission which they only have 37hrs to accomplish,and the rescuers (historians, archaeologists, security people)could never imagine what they were getting into and what the company who sponsored their dig and asked for their help was really into. There was definitely a lack of full disclosure! AND a catastrophe happens at the lab and it is a race against time to see if it can be fixed to get the people back to present day 1999.
Since I loved it so much, why isn't it 5 stars? Some scenes strained credulity. Too many in the nick of time rescues from some horrible death. The MCs weren't fleshed out enough and could they really have survived all that they experienced with their backgrounds?

Possibly my least favorite Crichton book. The premise is pretty cool - using quantum mechanics to travel to (and return from) parallel universes. The first few chapters are definitely attention grabbers. The middle part of the book, set in the 13th century, kind of drags on. And, like many other Crichton books, the end is a bit of an afterthought.

Ich weiß gar nicht, wo ich anfangen soll, dieses Buch zu rezensieren. Letzten Endes hat mich einfach alles daran aufgeregt. Vor allem die Charaktere.

Nicht nur sind die Figuren eindimensional und haben genau eine Eigenschaft (Chris ist ein Hitzkopf; Marek ist der mit dem Wissen, das immer dann convenient daherkommt, wenn es benötigt wird; Kate ist die Frau), sie sind auch unglaublich dumm. Chris ist Geschichtsdoktorand und hat keine Ahnung, dass "edel" sein im Mittelalter bedeutet, dass man adlig ist. Ernsthaft? Ich bin gerade im letzten Semester meines Bachelors, würde behaupten, ich hätte wenig Ahnung von mittelalterlicher Geschichte und kann trotzdem mit Sicherheit sagen, dass mein Wissen fundierter ist als das dieses Charakters. Es ist aber nicht nur, dass die Figuren ungebildet sind, sie denken auch nicht für zwei Pfennig nach. Nie. Dadurch stolpern sie von Event zu Event und das innerhalb von 37 Stunden.

Ja, die Figuren haben weniger als zwei Tage Zeit, um einen in der Vergangenheit festsitzenden Professor zu retten und werden dabei fast von Rittern umgebracht, nehmen an einem Ritterturnier teil, bei dem sie tjosten müssen (und überleben das, ohne dass ihnen das Pferd verdientermaßen den Schädel eintritt), werden dann vom Burgherrn gefangen genommen, fliehen, rennen durch den Wald, suchen ein Kloster auf und am Ende geht alles in Flammen auf. Das ganze Buch ist eine Ausgabe vom magischen Baumhaus für Erwachsene. Das "für Erwachsene" beschreibt hier allerdings nur die Art des Contents, denn die Art und Weise wie dieser präsentiert wird, kommt einem Kinderbuch ziemlich nah. Tiefe ist an keiner Stelle zu erwarten.

Was mich zudem zur Weißglut getrieben hat, ist Crichtons Darstellung von historischer Forschung. Zwar geht er darauf ein, dass sich die Geschichtswissenschaft in den letzten Jahren stark verändert hat (das Buch ist von 2000), lässt dies aber neben der Tatsache stehen, dass seine Figuren ein Bild vom Mittelalter haben, das ziemlich absolut klingt und nicht danach, dass sie offen für wissenschaftlichen Diskurs wären. Ein weiteres Problem stellt die Tatsache dar, dass ein Roman, der in der Vergangenheit spielt, einen dazu zwingt sich Dinge selbst auszudenken. Das ist überhaupt nicht schlimm, schließlich handelt es sich um Fiktion, doch Crichtons Darstellung ist die des "dunklen Mittelalters", die er im Buch selbst verurteilt. Seine mittelalterliche Welt fühlt sich einfach nicht echt an. Zum einen wegen der sich viel zu schnell überschlagenden Ereignisse, zum anderen wegen der ebenfalls eindimensionalen Nebencharaktere, die absolut klischeehaft reden. Ich bin mir sicher, dass Crichton sich keine einzige Quelle durchgelesen hat, um einschätzen zu können, wie die Mundart in diesem Bereich Frankreichs 1357 gewesen sein könnte.
Ein bisschen bessere Recherche sollte schon drin sind (auch wenn die Bibliographie bis auf die Abwesenheit von Quellen zumindest einige solide Monografien enthält).

A Mad Scientist has built up a corporation to exploit his discovery that people can be squirted into the past, and returned the same way, through wormholes in the quantum foam. Well, not quite. In the schema of this novel, actual time travel is impossible. It is also impossible to transfer physical items any larger than the scale of the quantum foam from one parallel universe to another. It is, however, possible to strip a macroscopic object -- e.g., a human being -- down to its basic information and squirt this string of binary code through a wormhole into an exceedingly similar but different universe, where it will be automatically reassembled because, er, It Is A Fundamental Rule That This Is What Happens. (There are occasional trivial transcription errors, which can accumulate to become serious, so people make only a limited number of "trips".) Further, because some exceedingly similar parallel universes haven't progressed quite as far along the timeline as ours has, you can in effect travel into the past -- as into an area of the French Dordogne which Mad Scientist has been setting up to become -- you've guessed it! -- a sort of theme park.

Well, maybe. During all of this laying out of the supposedly plausible scientific underpinning of the tale, I confess my disbelief plummeted quite a few times. First, if the past you travel to is in a different universe, how come someone stranded in that universe's medieval France is (as in the early stages of Timeline) able to leave a message that archaeologists can unearth in our universe's modern France? Second, if you destroy me entirely in order to produce a mountain of data that can be used to create an exact duplicate of me, complete with all my consciousness and memories, while that duplicate is to all intents and purposes me, this doesn't alter the fact that my self has died. (To see what I mean, imagine you could produce the duplicate me without destroying the original. Now stand the two of us side-by-side and put a bullet through the brain of one of us. The consciousness of that individual indubitably comes to an end, even though a perfect copy is preserved in the other individual.) Third, while I'm moderately okay about the moderns having earplugs that translate various medieval languages for them, I'm still confused as to how, when they speak, they can be understood by medieval French speakers merely by sticking the occasional "sooth" and "prithee" into their dialogue. Fourth, the whole bit about reassembly on the far side of the wormhole always happening Just Because That's The Way The Multiverse Works seems a complete copout.

And so on.

Whatever, our gang of gallant archaeologists is sent back to rescue their stranded colleague and of course immediately everything starts going wrong. The bulk of the novel is made up of them having extraordinarily tedious adventures that seem to have been plotted less for a novel, more for a multiple-choice adventure gamebook. The writing is at best pedestrian, and often enough lurches into the slapdash. One of the main baddies seems to be a dead ringer for Blackadder, albeit with a French accent. We get occasional throwaway lines that seem to presage the bonkers pseudoscience of Crichton's final novel, State of Fear, such as "Even the most established concepts -- like the idea that germs cause disease -- were not as thoroughly proven as people believed" (page 365). Meanwhile, back in the modern day/our own universe, the Mad Scientist is thinking that the easiest way of keeping the whole fiasco from the press might be just to abandon the archaeologists to their fate. Me, I was wondering why the hell he'd sent archaeologists on the rescue mission in the first place: bearing in mind that it doesn't really matter when you set off so long as your arrival point in the past is correct, why didn't he hire a bunch of survival experts and spend a year training them in medieval customs and linguistics, and then mount the rescue of the stranded boffin?

And so on.

It was only because I'm working on an essay about time-travel stories that I finished this dreary effort, and only because I got it from the library that it didn't get thrown at the wall a few times.

“The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn’t flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems— of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren’t separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations.”

There is a reason why Crichton was a blockbusting bestselling author, he had a knack for explaining things that do not make sense in such a way that they seem to make sense. I like his take on the mechanics of time traveling in this book, it is more logical and believable than most stories in this popular subgenre. This mechanics involves quantum science and the multiverse, traveling to parallel worlds set in earlier time periods than ours, through wormhole connections in quantum foam. I have never heard of quantum foam either, but Crichton anticipated that, and a pretty clear explanation is fused into the narrative. Yes, Crichton kinda rocks (or rocked, as in R.I.P.).

Timeline is about three historians traveling to the year 1357 to rescue a professor who is stranded there on a previous trip. The mission, of course, turns out to be vastly more complicated than the quick in and out trip they anticipated. Jousting, sword fights, conflagration, and uses of guillotine ensue, not to mention the wearing of tights, baggy hoses, and doublets.

While Timeline is jam-packed with incidents and adventures the plotline is fairly straightforward. Crichton wrote short chapters, often with a little surprising turn of event or cliffhangers at the end of a chapter. I imagine this is a little like writing a catchy hook in a pop song, in any case, the commercial appeal of such a technique is obvious. Stylistically it is not very literary or elegant but it does have mass appeal. He also wrote ridiculously fun action scenes and hair-raising escapades; he even made jousting interesting and exciting.
n  n

Besides the very interesting quantum science expositions early on in the book, once the main characters are in the medieval era there are not many scenes of people standing around talking. Crichton probably deliberately wrote the book to be visual and filmable, and it was, of course, adapted into the 2003 movie, which may have been his intent all along (I have not seen it though). The only snag for me is the limited emphasis on time traveling. I normally prefer time traveling stories to cover multiple eras going backward and forward to and from the past, the present and future, with mind-bending paradoxes galore (something like  The Man Who Folded Himself, the most fun time traveling book ever). I doubt this is what Crichton set out to do, he seems more interested in writing about the rollicking adventure modern characters in medieval time. This book is more akin to Mark Twain’s  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court than H.G. Wells’  The Time Machine. Characterization is rather perfunctory, none of the characters seem particularly fleshed out or nuanced. Having said that I don’t fault Crichton for this, he chose to focus on the plot instead of the drivers of the plot, Clarke and Asimov did much the same thing and their work do not really suffer from it. They wisely played to their own strengths.

I believe Crichton did respect his readers’ intelligence hence all the quantum science expositions. However, Timeline was written to appeal to the masses, but not necessarily the “unwashed masses”, just about anyone can enjoy this sort of thing regardless of their bathing frequency.

Quotes:
“Quantum technology flatly contradicts our common sense ideas of how the world works. It posits a world where computers operate without being turned on and objects are found without looking for them. An unimaginably powerful computer can be built from a single molecule. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Distant objects are examined without any contact. Computers do their calculations in other universes. And teleportation — “Beam me up, Scotty” — is ordinary and used in many different ways.”

“In the ordinary world, we have beliefs about cause and effect. Causes occur first, effects second. But that order of events does not always occur in the quantum world. Effects can be simultaneous with causes, and effects can precede causes.”

“At very small, subatomic dimensions, the structure of space-time is irregular. It’s not smooth, it’s sort of bubbly and foamy. And because it’s way down at the quantum level, it’s called quantum foam.”

“Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused — everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the century.”

“In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.”

Cuando uno se acerca a Michael Crichton sabe que está pisando territorio de bestseller, con lo bueno y con lo malo que eso implica. Sí, este libro engancha casi desde el principio y, a pesar de su extensión, se lee con muchísima facilidad. Pero la falta absoluta de profundidad de los personajes y la simpleza de la trama me impidieron conectar con la historia… y eso que lo tenía todo para gustarme (viajes en el tiempo, entorno medieval y misterio científico incluidos).
En esta historia, un grupo de estudiantes de arqueología, tras realizar un hallazgo inexplicable en los restos de una ciudad medieval francesa, se verán envueltos en una operación de rescate... en el tiempo.
Lo que más disfruté fue el arranque de la novela, por todo el suspense y las preguntas sin resolver que plantea. Pero una vez que se produce el viaje en el tiempo, para mí la trama fue perdiendo interés y los giros argumentales se vieron venir de lejos. Eso sí, el final fue bastante satisfactorio. No es una novela que recomiende especialmente, pero si te atrae el tema (o te gustó mucho la película) puede servir de evasión inofensiva.

RESEÑA COMPLETA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVZe_...

Zabavno.

This book is about time travel. Crichton is one of my favourite writers as he researches the subject of his work thoroughly before writing it. Here this is just pure fiction about time travel undertaken by a group of historians contracted by a greedy and rich entrepreneur to bring back a professor stuck up in the 1300s medieval France and England. The first 200 pages was slow and boring and I almost gave it up. Then the action started once they travelled back in time to the 1300s and it became a page turner.

I would rate this as 3 star due to the slow start and a flimsy plot although the action is macabre and thrilling.

3.5 STARS

"In an Arizona desert, a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. Halfway around the world archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology. Now this group is about to get a chance not to study the past but to enter it. And with history opened to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survival–six hundred years in the past. . . .they are unprepared and bear many dangerous difficulties due to this." (From Amazon)

Do not judge this book by the movie. A very swashbuckling adventure!

Having enjoyed Jurassic Park, I wanted to read more Crichton. Timeline now being the second novel of he’s that I’ve read.

What I found most fascinating were the complete flip between the two stories, as in Jurassic Park its about being the past being brought to the present. Whereas Timeline is very much a journey back in time and a perceived perceptions of that era being completely changed.
As a group of history students are transported back to 14th-century France to rescue their professor.

We’ve all got an idea of what the medieval times must have been like, but it’s not the same as experiencing it.
The same parallels can be drawn with the sound of a dinosaur.

I really like Crichton’s style of writing and found the characters to be much more interesting in this book.
It’s a great engaging time travel story, that has plenty of twists.