Note: The following review was originally published at
Amazon.co.uk on 1st. September 2013.
Link to original review:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/review/R3KWFD7PKBM9VS?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
As typifies Michael Crichton, 'Timeline' - a work of fiction
- begins with an essay, 'Science at the End of the Century', about the real
world that has informed the author's fiction. Crichton argues that just as it
was wrong for the scientists of the late Victorian era to assume they had
discovered all that was significant about the world, it is wrong for the
scientists of our era to believe that our understanding of the physical world
is complete, or even anywhere near accurate or true. Even the fundamental
physical assumptions that govern our lives can be overturned without ceremony.
New paradigms still await us.
Yet the most important point in 'Timeline' does not concern
science or technology, but history, and it's found in the story itself.
Appropriately, the prescient remarks are attributed to 'Robert Doniger', the
physicist-character responsible for Michael Crichton's fictitious 'time travel'
technology:-
[quote]"The purpose of history is to explain the
present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us
what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us why the
things we value are the things we should value. And it tells us what is to be
ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define
a whole society.
"The future lies in the past - in whoever controls the
past." [unquote][p480].
The past doesn't just leave a genetic legacy but a cultural
legacy too. Our own individual lives can be seen as travelling along a road
that stretches back into the distant past and on into the distant future to
whatever is ahead. It is true that the future belongs to the past. How we
interpret what has happened affects what we do now and how, and it also affects
what will happen in the future.
However, as 'Timeline' demonstrates, history is really a
summation of millions of human-scale incidents, with perhaps a tiny number
selected for the scrutiny of posterity. This begs an important question: As we
walk along the eternal 'road' of history that stretches deep into the past and
yonder into the future, do our own small actions have any impact on human
events? An answer is offered in this novel.
A group of graduate students trained in the culture of the
medieval period, are sent back to 14th. century France in the middle of the
Hundred Years' War to retrieve an academic colleague who is stranded there.
After various plot turns, they find themselves holed-up in an English-held
castle, which is under siege from the French. They have orders from the warlord
who has taken them that they are to make Greek Fire (incendiary substances that
are resistant to water), having let slip they know the method. The dilemma they
briefly discuss among themselves is whether they may be acting unethically and
altering the course of history by aiding the invading French against the
English using these sophisticated incendiary techniques, of a kind hitherto
undiscovered. The English are, after all, meant to lose the castle at the hands
of the French and so putting advanced technology in their hands might rather
spoil things. One character suggests, plausibly, that as this is just a local
battle, then even if the English win, that quirk is hardly likely to affect the
overall outcome of the Hundred Years' War. Another points out that whatever aid
might be given the English, history says that the French win and that's that.
His reasoning is that whatever aid is given, the result can never be an English
victory, and so must always be a French victory, if necessary due to other
factors, accidental or otherwise.
The idea of history as a canon of inevitability is
elucidated quite well early in the novel, in a discussion of so-called 'time
paradoxes' and why they cannot happen. Again from Doniger:-
[quote]"Say you go to a baseball game. The Yankees and
the Mets - the Yankees are going to win, obviously. You want to change the
outcome so that the Mets win. What can you do? You're just one person in a
crowd. If you try to go to the dugout, you will be stopped. If you try to go
onto the field, you will be hauled away. Most ordinary actions available to you
will end in failure and will not alter the outcome of the game.
"Let's say you choose a more extreme action: you'll
shoot the Yankee pitcher. But the minute you pull a gun, you are likely to be
overpowered by nearby fans. Even if you get off a shoot, you'll almost
certainly miss. And even if you succeed in hitting the pitcher, what is the
result? Another pitcher will take his place. And the Yankees will win the game.
"Let's say you choose an even more extreme action. You
will release a nerve gas and kill everyone in the stadium. Once again, you're
unlikely to succeed, for all the reasons you're unlikely to get a shot off. But
even if you do manage to kill everybody, you will have not changed the outcome
of the game. You may argue that you have pushed history in another direction -
and perhaps so - but you haven't enabled the Mets to win the game. In reality,
there is nothing you can do to make the Mets win. You remain what you were: a
spectator.
"And this same principle applies to the great majority
of historical circumstances. A single person can do little to alter events in
any meaningful way. Of course, great masses of people can 'change the course of
history.' But one person? No."[unquote][p172].
This is very true. History is not an accident or a quirk of
local idiosyncraces. It is governed by social forces. That does not exclude the
potential for individual decisions and actions to have a significant impact,
but the overall picture is of larger forces at work.
I think time travel is a popular theme in fiction because it
heroically subverts these broad historical truths. Instead of being one of
Doniger's helpless 'spectators', in a time travel novel (or film) we each enter
our own fantasy 'Yankee v. Mets' game in which unreal historical rules apply
and we really can determine the outcome. We become historically significant and
can 'change history'. In this sense, 'Timeline' can be seen as a non-traditional
'time travel' novel in that the classic subversive theme is rejected by
Crichton in favour of historical and scientific realism.
But time travel novels, stories and films are also popular
because they naturally allow for all kinds of exotic plot twists. Often, the
twists are of a literal nature, so that we end with the puzzling, and
unresolvable 'grandfather paradox' - i.e. the character engages in some
positive act that threatens his own existence. 'Timeline' is a little different
in that it adopts a thoroughly 'realist' attitude to the time travel problem.
The author cicumvents the traditional grandfather paradox by deciding that
there is no paradox - and strictly-speaking, there is no 'time travel' here
(the term is used for convenience only). Instead, the characters travel between
multiverses, of which there are infinite number. The science behind this
intriguing idea is explained clearly and well. This does take the edge a little
off the castle dilemma described above, but that doesn't stop the characters
behaving as if there is a paradox, or at least an ethical dilemma, when it
comes to 'changing the past'. But given the technological basis, why should
that matter? Why should the outcome of the entire Hundred Years' War not be
altered in one universe if history (and thus the future from that point) is
fixed anyway in the 'home universe'? But if history is inevitable, does this
not also lend credence to the notion of Fate? Are we slaves to the past
entirely?
What's perhaps a little frustrating about this novel is that
Crichton does not exploit this new and interesting dilemma more. If we are to
accept the technological solution, then what we are presented with is a kind of
'consequence-free' time travel, in which the past really is a theme park or laboratory
(as the case may be) and history becomes a truly experimental science embracing
actual Popperian falsification. Instead of that potential innovation, it has to
be said for all the promise and potential hidden here, the story in 'Timeline'
is a bit flat. Even so, it's a very good novel. When I first read Doniger's
inexplicable fate at the close of the novel, I was disappointed as I felt it
was unnecessary, but I put it down simply to the author's need to add some kind
of cataclysmic ending that would do justice to the novel's promise. However, on
reflection, I can see the author's perspective. 'Timeline' ends on the same
note that it opened: as a medieval morality tale. There are no real 'goodies'
or 'baddies' here. The putative 'villains' of the medieval 'Timeline' are
simply acting in a manner appropriate for their period. That's part of what
makes all this interesting. Theirs was a time before pacifying modernism took
hold. The good-bad axis that we are familiar with in our everyday lives was not
unfamiliar to medieval society - they had their laws and Chivalric Code and so
on - but these constructions are really modern, retroactive, simplifications of
what was in fact a complicated and nuanced social world that mixed raw violence
with civility. Having set the scene, there is no room for contemporary moral
piety. The characters who left for the medieval world are irrevocably changed
by it.
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