Knights In Quantumland

Writing great SF is very, very tough. The obligatory explanations that set the parameters also slow down narrative pace. The characters often turn into cardboard; SF writers tend to fall in love with their futuristic themes, ignoring the characters and plotlines except as vehicles for those themes. Writing a decent SF movie script is also hard. The temptation to sacrifice plot and character in favour of sheer pointless visual imagery is always strong.

Crichton hasn't ever quite managed to write a great SF novel yet. But he does consistently write interesting SF that can easily be transformed into blockbuster films. The Andromeda Strain, Sphere and Jurassic Park all fall into that category. So does Timeline. It is based on an interesting scientific premise, it is adequately plotted and it will make a fantastic movie.

The bedrock of Timeline is some of the obscure implications of Quantum Theory. And QT is a cosmic joke that works. (Without QT, I wouldn't be bashing this out on my PC, while simultaneously watching Euro 2000 on the TV.) However, QT with its duality of wave-particle nature and its uncertainty principle, weird interactions and probabilistic effects often doesn't make sense even to the physicists who created it. It can best be described as a mass of very elegant mathematics that works for mysterious reasons. Certain quantum effects are so puzzling that they give rise to a theory of multiple universes where the universe fractures along different timelines every time a particle alters its state of spin.

The same quantum effects could theoretically be used to build unimaginably powerful computers. A silicon-circuit based computer computes one and zero. A Quantum computer could use a 32-base number system. Research into Q-computers has recently been fuelled by fears that silicon-circuitry is coming close to the physical limits of size and complexity. But quantum effects occur in "alternate universes" and those effects could also send objects into the past or the future of an alternate but near-identical universe.

Crichton has a soft spot for the mad scientist whose creations go out of control and run amok. In Timeline, the statutory mad scientist creates a bank of Q-Computers and starts fiddling with object translation. The megalomaniac dumps his voyagers into France during the Hundred Years War. They are stuck there after a predictable series of accidents on both sides of the timeline.

Crichton is, as always, meticulous about his research and expends care on describing life in the 14th century. It was a period of complete confusion when the English and French slaughtered each other with great enthusiasm. His voyagers are modern scholars led by a professor of archaeology from Yale, and so are not caught completely unprepared by the manners and mores of the Dark Ages.

In the midst of paranoid warlords, casual gore, and fluid political alliances, the historians cope. Of course, they get bashed around. They escape being slaughtered by inches. They also remain steadfast to their determination not to "contaminate" the period by introducing technological anachronisms. The prospect of their return to safety is complicated by the presence of a psychotic killer, who is an earlier voyager from the same lab.

All in all, Timeline is a rattling good yarn that can be read as such by an undemanding audience. It also contains some interesting speculation about the future of computing and the likely spin-offs from the harnessing of quantum effects.

The people are, unfortunately, constructed from cardboard. But nobody ever paid Crichton megabucks for his skills in fleshing out characters.