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Loading... Timeline (original 1999; edition 2006)by Michael Crichton
Work InformationTimeline by Michael Crichton (1999)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Sci-Fi Brought - and read - in desperation whilst on holiday where I had run out of books (gasp!).[return][return]I was quickly disappointed and dissatisfied with the story and characters and I remember skimming much of the book as a result. This book (along with "airframe") are the books that finally put me off reading Crichton forever. really enjoyed this one. a very interesting take on time travel where there is many different branching time lines. the whole medieval setting was really cool and the characters were solid. i will say this book was also very graphic with the violence then i was expecting, not that there is anything wrong with that. but just a fair warning for those that never read it. but it was fun and thrilling just like Sphere although i dont put it on the same level as that but it was a good time. my only complaint is that when it shifts between the stuff happening in the medieval and the modern day when things are starting to get really good. it does slow it down a bit but i still think this is great book I read The Great Train Robbery as a kid and enjoyed it. I read Jurassic Park before it was made into a film. It was good. (The former as a movie was terrible farce; the latter as a movie was quite good... its sequels were terrible farce.) So, here is Timeline. It too was made into a movie. A terrible one not worth wasting your time on. Unless you like Billy Connolly. Or you swoon over Paul Walker and/or Gerard Butler in roles before they were huge stars. Or if you think Frances O'Connor should've been a bigger move star. Still, don't watch it. Now, I read this after finally biting the bullet and reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. This is Shakespeare compared to that. Much better writing, explication, character development, pacing, and plot. Brown says rather than shows. Crichton can at least show. Now, this isn't Shakespeare. It's not great literature. It won't be studied in lit classes in 2080. There are some holes in the science plot. (It's an alternate universe in the multiverse, but somehow the same universe?) It is rather a stretch that some history nerds will just say, "Okay, put me in a machine and send me back to the 1300s. I probably won't die." And I still don't get what the company was trying to do with a time machine... a medieval "theme park"? Huh? But, like any Crichton novel, decent science, well-researched history, and characters you care about and want to see win. An entertaining diversion.
''Timeline'' ends with Doniger delivering a caustic denunciation of the ''mania for entertainment'' that pervades American culture, in which jaded consumers increasingly seek an ''authenticity'' of experience that not even the most sophisticated ''artifice'' can offer. (Doniger wants to market time-travel as the ultimate amusement-park ride.) The irony, of course, is that few entertainment products are as artificial as Crichton's own work. Like shiny windup toys, his novels are diverting -- they're manically entertaining. (I gobbled up ''Timeline'' in a single sitting.) But like anything mechanical, they just end up repeating themselves. Whatever time Crichton is in, he's always writing the same book. Belongs to Publisher SeriesLos jet de Plaza & Janes (202.13) AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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 ago . . . No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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