Millennium

I think of this book as the Hollywood experience that broke John Varley. It's no coincidence that the villains at the end of the Titan trilogy were called Executiveproducers, who existed in a chain like the Human Centipede.

A ripping good scary futuristic story turned into a terrible movie by too much of the typical behind the scenes Hollywood stupidity that buys great stories and then re writes them. Badly, stinking of corporate, accounting and marketing.

Understand that Varley finally channeled his Los Angeles experience by writing a zombie story where his characters try to walk out of LA. Guess that means he finally feels better.

When an acquaintance saw me reading this novel, he said, "I saw the movie they made of that." "I didn't know they made a movie," I said. "Yeah," he replied, "with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd." "Well," I said, "I'm going to have to see whether I can find it on Netflix or something."

When I looked into it, however, I suddenly remembered that I HAD seen the movie, and I thought it was pretty terrible.

The book is hardly better.

Here's the premise: before two planes go down after a mid-air collision, people arrive on board from the future to whoosh the passengers to their time, 50,000 years from now. FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS! Yet it's funny that these people from the future hardly speak or act or think any different from those in the 20th show more century. The leader of the future-people is a woman who looks like a movie star (they have movies 50,000 years from now?), and she chain-smokes Lucky Strikes (!). When she talks about the show her time machine can make when it arrives in our present, the metaphor she uses is of more noise than Times Square on New Year's Eve. (It's nice to know that 50,000 years from now, there still is a Times Square, and people are still celebrating New Year's there.)

Think about 50,000 years prior to our time. If we traveled back that far, our ancestors would barely be even recognizable to us. Does evolution, invention, and discovery, stop somehow in the 20th century, so that our descendants 50 millennia from now are barely different from our Old Country cousins?

The woman leader from the future is in fact quite a ridiculous character, and given she's one of the book's two protagonists, that's a real problem. And for all the discussion the future-people have about creating time-paradoxes through the use of their time machine, I don't think what happens once they mess with the timeline has any congruence with the arguments at all.

When I picked this book up, I was anticipating a light, fun read. But there were too many instances in which the text caused me to figuratively roll my eyes as to make me groan over it instead. show less

Interesting that this is written in 1st person POV, which is usually considered a no-no in writing circles.

The old saying 'the book was better' comes to mind. In this case, I like the fuller story in the book, but I like that the movie is cleaner, less gritty. For me, it really took both to satisfy. Especially for the complications of multiple time excursions, which he did an excellent job of.

The book opens as the investigation into the tragic collision of two jumbo jets near Oakland is commencing. Sections relating the details of the investigation are interspersed with sections set in a time hundreds of years in the future in which people travel back in time to incidents in which everyone is killed (i.e. plane crashes), stun the passengers, send them to the future, and replace them with already dead bodies from the future, just before the crash. But why?

As the present day investigation proceeds various anomalies are discovered and can't be explained. The future is also changing, as the result of errors the team sending people from the past into the future may have made.

This is the first book by Varley that I've read, and it show more was a good one. It was very logical and real--there were no, "I can't suspend my disbelief for this," moment, and I was kept turning the pages. Recommended.

3 stars show less

This is a tie-in novel for the film version of Varley's own short story "Air raid". Most of the faults with this novel come from trying to flesh that story out to a mass-market film, with the compromises that have to be made for that exercise (such as injecting a punkish element to the visuals and character development). The original short story was, of course, better, but I retain a soft spot for the novel (and film), mainly because the basic story - time travellers rescue doomed passengers from air crashes to colonise the future because the Earth is ecologically doomed and the future humans too biologically and genetically compromised to be viable colonists - is the one I would most wish were true.

Read this last night. It's Varley for sure - more typical than I expected. But come on - a deus ex machina named BC for an ending? Makes me wonder what else I missed on the way through (I did catch some of the chapter titles).

In the end I guess the whole universe was just too unremittingly depressing for me to like it. Not shocking repulsive, just repetitively dull and dreary, especially the ending. The light at the end of the tunnel was too small, too far away and too dim to brighten it up at all.

Orson Card wrote once about the movie Memento that it was just a gimmick and hard to watch a second time because without the gimmick ordering it was a pretty boring story. There’s a little bit of that going on in Millennium. The story ordering follows Louise as she jumps through time. Since each jump doesn’t put her progressively forward, we get to learn things before Smith does, as his story moves forward linearly. It’s a little gimmicky but it works.

(Full review at my blog)