I wanted to talk about what knighthood was really like. And I wanted to write a story that dealt with the reality behind our cliched images of knights and courtly love. But in Timeline, I wanted to write a time travel story that took its premise seriously. Wells just uses time travel to make a point about the society at the time the novel was written. In recent years, most time travel stories have been comedies, or allegories. What would it be like? Would it be frightening? (I think it would be.) Would it be more dangerous than space travel? (Much more dangerous.) What would make you go anyway? So I began to think: suppose it was really possible to travel in time. (Nov.I hadn’t written an adventure story since Jurassic Park, and I thought it was time for another one. 1,500,000 first printing Literary Guild nain selection simultaneous large-print edition and audiobook.
There's strong suspense, too, as Crichton cuts between past and present, where the time-travel machinery has broken: Will the heroes survive and make it back? The novel has a calculated feel but, even so, it engages as no Crichton tale has done since Jurassic Park, as it brings the past back to vigorous, entertaining life. When elderly Yale history prof Edward Johnston travels back to his beloved 15th century and gets stuck, and his assistants follow to the rescue, excitement runs high, and higher still as Crichton invests his story with terrific period detail and as castles, sword-play, jousts, sudden death and enough bold knights-in-armor and seductive ladies-in-waiting to fill any toystore's action-figure shelves appear. From the startling opening, where an old man with garbled speech and body parts materializes in the Arizona desert, through the revelation that a venal industrialist has developed a risky method of time-travel (based on movement between parallel universes as in Crichton's other work, good, hard science abounds), there's not a dull moment.
Crichton remains a master of narrative drive and cleverness.
The novel, in fact, may improve as a movie its complex action, as the scientists are swept into the intrigue of the Hundred Years War, can be confusing on the page (though a supplied map, one of several graphics, helps), and most of its characters wear hats (or armor) of pure white or black. ""And the Oscar for Best Special Effects goes to: Timeline!"" Figure maybe three years before those words are spoken, for Crichton's new novel-despite media reports about trouble in selling film rights, which finally went to Paramount-is as cinematic as they come, a shiny science-fantasy adventure powered by a superior high concept: a group of young scientists travel back from our time to medieval southern France to rescue their mentor, who's trapped there.
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