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Timeline | 
| Author: Michael Crichton
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy Used: $0.01
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1767 reviews
Sales Rank: 146017
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7 x 4.6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0345417623
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780345417626
ASIN: 0345417623
Publication Date: October 24, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
When you step into a time machine, fax yourself through a "quantum foam wormhole," and step out in feudal France circa 1357, be very, very afraid. If you aren't strapped back in precisely 37 hours after your visit begins, you'll miss the quantum bus back to 1999 and be stranded in a civil war, caught between crafty abbots, mad lords, and peasant bandits all eager to cut your throat. You'll also have to dodge catapults that hurl sizzling pitch over castle battlements. On the social front, you should avoid provoking "the butcher of Crecy" or Sir Oliver may lop your head off with a swoosh of his broadsword or cage and immerse you in "Milady's Bath," a brackish dungeon pit into which live rats are tossed now and then for prisoners to eat. This is the plight of the heroes of Timeline, Michael Crichton's thriller. They're historians in 1999 employed by a tech billionaire-genius with more than a few of Bill Gates's most unlovable quirks. Like the entrepreneur in Crichton's Jurassic Park, Doniger plans a theme park featuring artifacts from a lost world revived via cutting-edge science. When the project's chief historian sends a distress call to 1999 from 1357, the boss man doesn't tell the younger historians the risks they'll face trying to save him. At first, the interplay between eras is clever, but Timeline swiftly becomes a swashbuckling old-fashioned adventure, with just a dash of science and time paradox in the mix. Most of the cool facts are about the Middle Ages, and Crichton marvelously brings the past to life without ever letting the pulse-pounding action slow down. At one point, a time-tripper tries to enter the Chapel of Green Death. Unfortunately, its custodian, a crazed giant with terrible teeth and a bad case of lice, soon has her head on a block. "She saw a shadow move across the grass as he raised his ax into the air." I dare you not to turn the page! Through the narrative can be glimpsed the glowing bones of the movie that may be made from Timeline and the cutting-edge computer game that should hit the market in 2000. Expect many clashing swords and chase scenes through secret castle passages. But the book stands alone, tall and scary as a knight in armor shining with blood. --Tim Appelo
Product Description
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. . . .
Download Description
Michael Crichton's new novel opens on the threshold of the twenty-first century. It is a world of exploding advances on the frontiers of technology. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Computers are built from single molecules. Any moment of the past can be actualized -- and a group of historians can enter, literally, life in fourteenth-century feudal France. Imagine the risks of such a journey. Not since Jurassic Park has Michael Crichton given us such a magnificent adventure. Here, he combines a science of the future -- the emerging field of quantum technology -- with the complex realities of the medieval past. In a heart-stopping narrative, Timeline carries us into a realm of unexpected suspense and danger, overturning our most basic ideas of what is possible.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1762 more reviews...
 Excellent medieval thriller July 15, 2008
Excellent story of rising in the past, medieval history in the Perigord. A book also well documented. No stop in midair. Very good book.
 My first Science Fiction book July 7, 2008
My family listened to this book on tape and overall we enjoyed the story. ITC is a company that is promoting and refining the ability to time travel. However, there are some problems with the travel; the travelers sometimes come back with their bodies off set so that the right side doesn't quite line up with the left creating disfigured bodies and malfunctioning innards. So there's the problem, ITC is bent on making a killing on their technology and for that they need travelers who are unaware of the little problems that can result as they work out the glitches.
We enjoyed the historical and architectural information throughout the book about 14th century medieval France. And we also were intrigued by quantum physics and the idea of time travel.
I did find the characters to be uninteresting and predictable. The one exception to this was Andre's surprise decision at the end of their time in medieval France.
I have never read or seen anything by Michael Crichton nor do I ever read science fiction so I had no idea what to expect from this genre or this author, but even down to my nine and eleven year old children enjoyed the story.
 good but kinda drags in places July 6, 2008
This is not the strongest Crighton book. It drags in places as we count down the the escape time the trvelrs have to get back to modern time. It was a sluggish read.
Entertaining June 30, 2008
I enjoyed this book for the most part. The historians getting sent back to the time and area that was the basis of their research was intriguing. However the plot in Castlegard was cliche due to the fact that the main characters always find some way out of every trap they are in. But then again, that is a typical action flick. Overall it was worth the read but not one of the best books I have read.
 A disappointing weak effort! June 6, 2008
16 out of 23 found this review helpful
What a shame! Compared with Crichton's past stellar work and exciting accomplishments like "Jurassic Park" and "The Andromeda Strain", "Timeline" is a derivative, pedestrian work riddled with inconsistencies and cardboard characters that falls completely flat!
ITC, a typical power driven, megalomaniacal firm built on cutting edge technology advances has developed the ability to travel in time. Crichton's clever and extremely well-imagined description of the hard science underlying the technology is the bright spot in an otherwise weak novel - complete destruction of the time traveler in our universe and a facsimile transmission of all the data necessary through a quantum foam wormhole to allow a re-construction of the time traveler in a parallel universe similar to but definitely different than our own. ITC's plan, an astonishingly venal and entirely unimpressive idea to use the past as a vast "realistic" tourist destination (as opposed to engineered, re-created theme parks) results in four historians being trapped in 14th century medieval France. (Haven't I read that somewhere before? I re-checked the cover to make sure I hadn't picked up my copy of Connie Willis's "Doomsday Book" in error)
At that point, the story devolves from a decent sci-fi based techno-thriller into a half-baked adventure in which the author would have us believe (to select only one outrageous example) that a modern day geek who dabbles in medieval weaponry would be able to withstand the onslaught of, not just one, but multiple knights in jousting contests and hand to hand swordplay. If a reader is willing to lay aside virtually all credibility issues, the adventure could be said to be diverting and passably exciting but, for me, it just seemed too far over the top.
Perhaps the largest disappointment for me was that the plot rested in large part on a glaring inconsistency - allowing notes and artifacts left behind by our erstwhile time "travelers", presumably in a parallel but DIFFERENT universe than our own, to somehow magically appear in OUR universe to be found by ITC's present day archeologists and technicians. Tut, tut, Mr Chrichton ... it's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature that way!
Recommended only for diehard Crichton fans who would like to ensure a complete collection.
Paul Weiss
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