Book Review: Timeline By Michael Crichton 5/5 Stars; leave it to Crichton to revitalize the past with such a vigorous and entertaining novel and a possible prescience for the infinite possibilities of science.
Timeline carries the reader into a realm of unexpected suspense and danger, often altering our most fundamental ideas of what is truly possible.
This magnificent adventure combines a science of the future – the emerging field of quantum technology – with the complex realities of the medieval past.
Timeline Will Now Be Discussed With Mild SPOILERS (the ending is not discussed)**
Michael Crichton’s Timeline opens on the threshold of the twenty-first century. It is a world – our present, mind you – exploding in advances of technology.
A daring tech company has succeeded in creating a quantum computer. With the near-instantaneous computing commutation and revolutionary massive data banks, the company has managed the long-awaited sci-fi dream of “copying” an entire person.
Not only that, but they also managed to manipulate and enlarge quantum foam particles. Combing these two remarkable feats they are able to send a person through a wormhole in space between two quantum foam particles – much like a fax machine.
The quantum world is an interesting place, one that scientists still don’t fully understand today. It can behave very differently than the physical world we know. Crichton explores this new frontier and includes many interesting footnotes for curious readers to follow up with.
Crichton dared to imagine a possibility of quantum foam wormholes connecting to a plethora of universes where different time periods all exist simultaneously.
This remarkable adventure is not technically time travel, but rather the ability to travel to a nearly identical past.
ITC’s CEO Robert Doniger, inventor of this quantum technology, believes people of the twentieth century will grow bored of current entertainment and crave anything that isn’t controlled by corporations. He argues people will turn to the past for rare and desirable experiences of authenticity.
Therefore, the future is in the past. And he plans to sell these authentic trips to the past, like tycoon John Hammond’s Jurassic Park or Walt Disney’s Disneyland.
ITC has been steadily buying up property around the world and funding archeological digs to learn more about possible “time travel” locations.
We meet our university protagonists at a dig in France. When pressed about funding, ITC allows Professor Edward Johnson to explore his exact dig in fourteenth century France using their quantum technology.
When the professor doesn’t return, only a group of his graduate students are his best chance of survival. This group has been given the chance of a lifetime: not just to study the past, but to enter it. However, they may find themselves fighting for their own survival – six hundred years ago during the Hundred Years War.
Crichton remains a master of narrative drive and cleverness; there’s never a dull moment.
Excitement runs high during the rescue attempt and higher still as Crichton invests his story with terrific period detail: castles, sword-play, jousts, sudden death and bold knights-in-shining-armor.
There is also strong suspense as Crichton cuts between past and present, where the time-travel machine has broken: Will the heroes survive and make it back?
Best of all, the medieval setting is highly accurate and described well.
This alone makes the book a worthwhile read, especially for those who are unfamiliar or only somewhat familiar with the Middle Ages.
Crichton effectively addresses some common misconceptions about medieval life. He presents the reader with a vivid picture that is at times much more attractive, and at other times much more frightening and repellent, than that is generally presented to us in popular fiction and film.
Crichton truly managed to bring the Middle Ages to life.
Timeline was made into a feature-length, theatrical-release movie, directed by Richard Donner and starring Paul Walker, Frances O’Connor, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly and David Thewlis.
But if you want to see it, you will have to look back into your past to do it.
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 up 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 ago.
Mass Market Paperback, 489 pages Published June 2000 by Arrow Books (first published November 16th 1999)
The Forgotten Fiction ANNOUNCEMENT SCHEDULE 3-2021 To 6-2021: we are going keep TFF’s Eager Readers up to snuff with all of the happenings, from book reviews, to guest reviewers, to giveaway contests, to Rune Works reader-inspired creations.
Seeing how TFF has grown immensely in just a few short months and less than a year since its launch, I want to thank you all for your support and shared enthusiasm for all that we love as bibliophiles.
ANNOUNCEMENT SCHEDULE 3-2021 To 8-2021
March 30, 2021 @ 12pm EST
TFF Book Giveaway Contest Is Announced & Opened To Enter Free
April 5, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Livestream & Giveaway Contest Drawing
April 28, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Book Giveaway Contest Is Announced & Opened To Enter Free
May 4, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Livestream & Giveaway Contest Drawing
May 26, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Book Giveaway Contest Is Announced & Opened To Enter Free
June 1, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Livestream & Giveaway Contest Drawing
June 30, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Book Giveaway Contest Is Announced & Opened To Enter Free
July 6, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Livestream & Giveaway Contest Drawing
July 28, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Book Giveaway Contest Is Announced & Opened To Enter Free
August 3, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Livestream & Giveaway Contest Drawing
August 25, 2021 @ 1pm EST
TFF Book Giveaway Contest Is Announced & Opened To Enter Free
And so we will be doing a monthly livestream, via Facebook Live, and in that brief time I will share news for upcoming book reviews and RW Cases or other creations, as well as finish each session with a drawing to choose a winner for a free giveaway contest.
What did I just say?!
Well, yeah, every month there will be a free to enter TFF Giveaway Contest taking place the week before the livestream.
I love reading, and TFF will be spreading the love!
The prizes will get better and better – wait until you see this month’s contest! – and most often there will be a choice for the winner (or winners, when we mix it up) to choose from so that if we are giving away books you can hopefully get something you do not have.
Quite a few brilliant authors are interested in writing book reviews on all sorts of fiction.
I spoke briefly last week on Elizabeth Yoo’s upcoming reviews of 1960’s Italian fiction that she will blow us away with, but so much more than that is on the horizon, and since I love almost every type of fiction out there, from horror and sci-fi to historical fiction, there will always be a fun variety to peruse.
So in this site’s NEWS section I will post a TFF Quarterly ANNOUNCEMENT SCHEDULE and I will feature them in a pulldown from the site menu under NEWS too.
What is coming up?
Well, besides the monthly contests, I will pick a book of the month that either was or is going to be reviewed during the livestream – a teaser, if you will – and I would like to start some Q/A time too (maybe not every time), but I will play that by ear. I love to live in the moment, so we will see where things take us.
Coming up next in book reviews…
In no particular order, except that CD’s NIGHT SHIFT by Stephen King is almost certainly next, here are the book-newcomers to The Forgotten Fiction magazine:
NIGHT SHIFT by Stephen King – Cemetery Dance Gift Edition
Ready Player One By Ernest Cline – Lettered Edition By Curious King Books
Later By Stephen King – Numbered Edition By Hard Case Crime
A Scanner Darkly By Philip K. Dick – Suntup Editions Numbered and Artist Editions
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – Suntup Editions Numbered and Artist Editions
More Books by Michael Crichton – requests are open, folks!
The End Of Eternity By Isaac Asimov (and pictures of a rare first edition)
The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War Of The Worlds, all By H.G. Wells – all Suntup Edition’s Limited Numbered
Killer Come Back To Me the unpublished Ray Bradbury book celebrating Bradbury’s 100th birthday by Hard Case Crime
There will be many books that pop up and wedge there way in between the ones above, but these are some of the fiction titles, young and old, to look forward to.
Branching off of both The Forgotten Fiction and my fledgling production company, press and PR agency Rune Works Productions Ltd. are the literary creations crafted by hand in my woodshop, like the TFF Rune Works Book Cases.
Call them traycases, slipcases, or whatever else you want, but do not call them mass produced haha.
These are beloved creations that I have hand crafted for my own library, art to hold my most precious art.
I am busy working on these RW Rare Book Cases:
A one-of-a-kind SILENCE OF THE LAMBS 2021 ARC case for the winner of the Unofficial Fans Of Suntup group’s contest, Kyle – this will be a 1 / 1 and like nothing anyone has ever seen
SECRET Case Project [hint: horror and Ania Ahlborn]
CARRIE 1st Edition case
FAHRENHEIT 451 case
The Gunslinger case
The Long Walk case
“The Bachman Books” case
“Gunslinger” Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction cases
A I of I creation customized for an issue of Astounding Fiction from 1953
Startling Mystery 1967 and 1969 Case
Fight Club cases, with a strip of cartoon film?
A Scanner Darkly case for the first edition of Philip K. Dick’s classic
Revival Us First Edition for signed copies
End Of Watch Us First Edition for signed copies
If It Bleeds Us First Edition for signed copies
The End Of Eternity Isaac Asimov case
And even a non-book case for a rare Star Wars Lego piece!
There are a couple of cases I want to remain a secret for now.
These are some ambitious projects that I have undertaken and some will be ready to fly in the near future, while others may take a year or more to develop (some have already crossed into this realm).
These are handmade and planned and collaborated on with usually one person, me, or a very few others, at times.
That takes time.
But I love to make them and I love to see their purpose fulfilled as the books join with them, and much as time is one of our most precious commodities, up there with family and health, I take my time to ensure the quality I feel all of my work, from my written works to my web-made to my hand-made works all are the most they can be.
Easy Go By John Lange (Michael Crichton) A 4/5 Star Adventure is a Spoiler-free Book Review.
Beneath the sands of the Egyptian desert lies treasure beyond imagining. If you found a hidden message deciphered from hieroglyphics would you dispatch a treasure hunt?
How would you fund the dig and sell the treasure?
Who would you trust to hire?
Barnaby, an astute archeologist with a specialization in hieroglyphics, finds himself in this peculiar situation.
By pure happenstance, he puts trust in someone he would have never expected to: a bold journalist who proved to have connections and all the answers.
Here is the story synopsis, and the book review continues below:
Beneath the sands of the Egyptian desert lies treasure beyond imagining. And when a professor of archaeology finds clues to the location of a Pharaoh’s lost tomb in ancient hieroglyphs, he hatches a plan to find the burial site – and plunder it.
But can a five-man team of smugglers and thieves uncover what the centuries have hidden? And even if they find it, can they escape with it…and with their lives?
Original Title: Easy Go
Author: John Lange (Pseudonym), Michael Crichton
Paperback, 276 pages
Published October 29th 2013 by Hard Case Crime (first published 1968)
The following TFF book review of John Lange’s Easy Go is Spoiler-free*****.
Would they pull off the largest archeological heist in history? Can a five-man team of smugglers and thieves uncover what centuries have hidden?
And even if they find it, can they smuggle it…and escape with their lives?
Easy Go is an adventure novel about a small group of thieves who find information about the hiding place of the last tomb of the Pharaohs, secretly excavate the tomb, and make plans to escape with the treasure from Egypt.
The story of this heist, told with humor, is reminiscent of an Oceans Eleven scheme.
This read is among Crichton’s earlier works, and this novel is not a masterpiece but it is a fun, quick, worthwhile read.
Critics argue it suffers from a number of flaws both in terms of character development and in terms of the plot. However, keeping in mind this was written in a medical student’s free time, the story flows well and the discovery of the tombs is quite compelling.
Easy Go was Crichton’s third published novel while he was enrolled at Harvard Medical School in 1968 as John Lange.
The Andromeda Strain was released the previous year and published under his real name. Before abandoning the practice in 1972, while writing The Terminal Man, Michael Crichton actually published 10 of his first 11 titles under pseudonyms such as John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. While two of those titles were eventually republished under his own name, the rest were abandoned to the dusty shelves of used bookstores around the world, becoming collectibles for those who knew what to look for.
Ultimately, it’s not going to make you forget the likes of Jurassic Park or State of Fear, nevertheless Easy Go is an amusing little adventure that offers some compelling glimpses of the Crichton we’ve come to appreciate.
The Andromeda Evolution: Crichton’s Andromeda Strain sequel, terrifying sequel, has arrived as Daniel H. Wilson finished the late author’s manuscript with the support of the Michael Crichton’s family.
And this begs the question: just how many more Michael Crichton unfinished manuscripts are waiting to be finished in future collaborations?
Wilson, a robotics engineer, is best known for his use of literary wit and technology and is most famous for his ridiculous thriller “Robopcalypse,” so he was an apt choice for collaborating on the late author Chrighton’s sequel to his pandemic-driven novel.
The following review will contain **SPOILERS** for both The Andromeda Strain and The Andromeda Evolution.
The Andromeda Strain, as millions of fans know, describes the panicked efforts to stop the spread of an alien microparticle that first instantly coagulates human blood or induces the harrowing suicide of dozens to only then mutate to dissolve plastics in the upper atmosphere.
Here is the story synopsis, and the review continues below it.
In 1967, an extraterrestrial microbe came crashing down to Earth and nearly ended the human race. Accidental exposure to the particle—designated The Andromeda Strain—killed every resident of the town of Piedmont, Arizona, save for an elderly man and an infant boy. Over the next five days, a team of top scientists assigned to Project Wildfire worked valiantly to save the world from an epidemic of unimaginable proportions. In the moments before a catastrophic nuclear detonation, they succeeded.
In the ensuing decades, research on the microparticle continued. And the world thought it was safe…
Deep inside Fairchild Air Force Base, Project Eternal Vigilance has continued to watch and wait for the Andromeda Strain to reappear. On the verge of being shut down, the project has registered no activity—until now. A Brazilian terrain-mapping drone has detected a bizarre anomaly of otherworldly matter in the middle of the jungle, and, worse yet, the tell-tale chemical signature of the deadly microparticle.
Project Wildfire is activated, and a diverse team of experts hailing from all over the world is dispatched to investigate the potentially apocalyptic threat. If the Wildfire team can’t reach the quarantine zone, enter the anomaly, and figure out how to stop it, this new Andromeda Evolution will annihilate all life as we know it.
Fifty years later, a mutated strain has dropped in Earth’s atmosphere while a special team of observers maintain Project Eternal Vigilance.
When The Andromeda Evolution opens, a drone spots a metallic-looking shape growing up out of the Amazon jungle, “the whole of it gleaming like a beetle’s waxy shell in the rising midday sun.”
Situated along the equator, this giant structure is located far from any development, deep in an area inhabited only by tribes who have never made contact with modern civilization.
Mass spectrometry data taken by military satellites indicates that the quickly swelling mutation is “an almost exact match to the Andromeda strain.”
A nuclear strike is debated but considered too problematic to be enacted as a “solution.”
A nuclear explosion would feed the anomaly that lives off energy…provoking the declaration:
“We are facing an unknown enemy who is staging an attack over the gulf of a hundred-thousand years and across our solar system and likely the cosmos.
“This is war.”
Humanity’s hope falls on Project Wildfire’s shoulders.
Consisting of a few scientists, the elite Wildfire team tries to keep the planet from being infected while persisting through the perilous jungle landscape that they find they are dangerously ill-equipped to face.
The jungle proves to be an ominous setting with death and misery lurking around every suspenseful corner. Wilson’s background in robotics is illustrated throughout the novel as technological gizmos play a crucial role in the plot.
Crichton would be proud of the culminated novel. His typical style of literary pacing is amplified in this suspenseful rollercoaster – an exponential increase of suspense carries through until the novel’s conclusion.
Near future technology and innovation are present and most appreciating to read.
The Andromeda Evolution is a must-read sequel for The Andromeda Strain fans and the science fiction community.
Book Review: Micro By Michael Crichton & Richard Preston WOWs, as young upcoming grad students find themselves heading to Hawaii in pursuit of cutting-edge careers in microbiology a whole new world is opened up to them on the wake of a murder investigation.
The Crichton manuscript and notes for Micro were posthumously delivered to Preston who continued the stunning, thrilling, science-based adventure story Crichton is so well known for.
Preston deserves exceptional credit for delivering the novel with Crichton’s pacing and tone – a work that he would truly be proud of.
Here is the story synopsis, and the review continues below it.
In a locked Honolulu office building, three men are found dead with no sign of struggle except for the ultrafine, razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly invisible to the human eye.
In the lush forests of Oahu, groundbreaking technology has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting. Trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of bacteria species, are being discovered; they are feeding a search for priceless drugs and applications on a scale beyond anything previously imagined.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start-up. Nanigen MicroTechnologies dispatches the group to a mysterious lab in Hawaii, where they are promised access to tools that will open a whole new scientific frontier.
But once in the Oahu rain forest, the scientists are thrust into a hostile wilderness that reveals profound and surprising dangers at every turn. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, they find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power. To survive, they must harness the inherent forces of nature itself.
This is a *SPOILER-FUL Review WARNING*
Micro starts with a murder mystery and captivates the reader with gripping action scenes that only get more compelling until the novel ends.
As a Hawaiian tech company’s malicious owner – a crook and a killer – uses his new technology to shrink a group of grad students down to half an inch, they find themselves stranded in the rainforest, in an unknown environment, running from giant insects and other gruesome creatures.
Michael Crichton doing research for Micro in Hawaii | Photo credit: Sherri Crichton
Charles Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest is law and it takes all of their intellect to survive.
Crichton and Preston take us to a whole new world – delightful imagery, chilling predators, and a new ecosystem.
They show their love for the natural world, but remind the readers of its explicit cruelty. The authors adopt a shocking realism. Characters are picked off right and left, sometimes without warning, and in the cruelest of ways.
An argument can be made for one dimensional characters; but heroic rescues always make up for character flaws.
A page of Michael Crichton’s handwritten Micro notes
Crichton died in 2008 at the age of 66. He was writing thrillers in medical school under the pen name John Lange.
His novels often blend medical and technological elements with adventure and violence. Upon his death, he left this unfinished manuscript, including detailed plot outlines and notes, with Richard Preston, himself a respected author of science-related novels such as The Hot Zone.
All in all, Micro ensures all readers will reflect upon the beauty and horror of the natural world. Especially if/when a villain has the technology to create micro-drones that could kill any leader on Earth.
P.S. If You Want To Know A Little More About How The Forgotten Fiction Is Different & Our Mission . . .
We are really trying to achieve two main goals here:
To bolster every author who puts out a work of fiction long after the initial buzz that accompanied its release. This is something that is usually left to an expensive public relations manager or company and even with all of their powers of marketing / PR are limited in where they can place the book months after its launch. This includes limited edition and small press publications, like Suntup Editions, that are also reviewed for their physical beauty, as well as the work’s literary art and often illustrations, so long as the initial work has been out 60 days.
We love books of fiction! And as readers we have too little time to read ALL of the books that fall onto our tentative To-Read List. The Forgotten Fiction hopes that with our Yea or Nay stamp, we can definitively give our unbiased opinion to you as a recommendation that may or may not move a book from the stack to your Must-Read List.
