Barring the interesting–and probably wildly inaccurate–science, Michael Crichton’s Timeline has a lot of surprising similarities to Jurassic Park: a megalomaniac capitalist who wants to use the amazing technology his company invented to create an amusement park, a ticking clock, and a Faustian warning that just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should.
In Timeline, this cautionary tale begins with an escapee drawing attention to a company that’s up to something secret. Then the academics are introduced. In Timeline, they are historians, currently excavating a castle in France. The historians are flown in to investigate the technology and, because it’s a Crichton novel, things go to hell right rapidly. The technology, based on some interesting ideas about quantum physics, effectively transports people through time. You’ll have to read the book to find out how the science works, because I know it will sound ridiculous if I try to explain it.
One more similarity between Timeline and Jurassic Park: the technology fails right when they need it. The historians are stranded in the past until the time machine gets fixed.
The historians get transported back to their castle during one of the hot points in the Hundred Years’ war. And just like we learned in Jurassic Park, Timeline reinforces the point that the past is a lot more dangerous than we give it credit for. The middle ages, as Crichton portrays it, are not a place of courtly love and ignorant peasants. The knights are deadlier than raptors if only because we know to stay the hell away from the raptors. Within seconds of arriving in the past, the historians’ guides are dead and they are on their own. I lost count of the number of times they almost got killed.
Even though it’s even less believable than Jurassic Park, Timeline is a fun read. It’s one of the few works of historical fiction that I think actually get close what life was like. The only thing that could have made it more real was if the publishers put scratch and sniff on the pages. Crichton did a terrific job of describing the sights and sounds of medieval France. With the clock ticking down the minutes until their time machine irreparably fails and the historians trying not to die, the plot just hums along.