About
Timeline by Michael Crichton attempts to frame the dangers of “move fast and break things” mentality in with a sci-fi narrative. Mr. Crichton is an author of medical fiction and techno-thrillers, as well as a successful filmmaker.
- 464 pages
- Publisher : Knopf
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 0679444815
My rating for Timeline – 4
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More books by Michael Crichton*
Thoughts:
Michael Crichton’s Timeline is an excellent techo-thriller and an enjoyable romp of speculative engineering. I loved the world building of the intense and kinetic environment, and the challenges that come with it.
The first third of Timeline explains what the quantum foamed-space is and how it’s formed. It’s done so well that I almost started to believe such technology exists, or about to exist.
Man of la Tech’s Two Cents: The Quantum Transcription Error
1. The Checksum Failure
When ITC “broadcasts” a human to the 14th century, they are essentially performing a high-bandwidth data transfer across the multiverse. Every trip introduces “noise.” In our world, we use Checksums to ensure a file remains identical after a transfer. ITC’s system has a high tolerance for error—it allows for a “close enough” re-assembly of the human body.
2. Lossy Compression in Biology
The “pitting” and internal scarring the characters experience are the biological equivalent of JPEG artifacts. Every time the user is re-uploaded, the “resolution” of their DNA and cellular structure degrades. It’s a literal manifestation of Technical Debt: you can only “patch” a human so many times before the original source code is unreadable.
3. The Production Environment Risk
ITC deployed this “Beta” tech into a high-stakes environment without a Rollback Plan. Once the data corruption starts, there is no “Restore from Backup.” You are stuck with the corrupted version of yourself—a hardware host running a glitched version of its own OS.
When our protagonists arrive in the Middle Ages, they find themselves in a brutal world, in the middle of a war they have no stakes in, besides staying alive. Instead of impressing the people of the time with their fancy education degrees, they find the efficiency and ingeniousness of engineering very impressive.
I always find it amusing that people who cannot do without their $7 daily coffee moan that they wished they would have been “born 500 years ago.” Life was hard, harsh, difficult and painful. All the gold in the king’s treasury wouldn’t be able to buy the dental care you get at your local dentist, for example.
Mr. Crichton does tell a great story, but his characters, I thought, are just there to drive the plot forward. I liked them, but I didn’t think they were flushed out as much as they could be. Too bad because they are interesting people, I feel this was a missed opportunity.
The most terrifying part of the novel was the transcription errors in ITC’s “broadcasting” of humans. The company is basically performing a high-bandwidth data transfer back in time. The noise introduced into the trip allows for a “close enough” reassembly of… the human body. At the time the novel was written, checksums were around to ensure that a transfer is identical at both the sending and the receiving end. With all the interesting science in the book, I’m surprised he didn’t include it.
Synopsis:
Historians discover a man in the Arizona dessert, in the hospital they discover anomalies in his blood they cannot understand. Eventually they are informed by the President of ITC that the man has traveled to the past using their proprietary quantum technology.
Graduate students Chris Hughes and Kate Erickson, assistant professor André Marek, and technology specialist David Stern are flown to ITC and travel to the year 1357 in a attempt to rescue a colleague, Professor Edward Johnston. The travelers find themselves among knights, warriors, monks and peasants in the middle of a war, fighting to survive and get back home.
Buy Timeline from Amazon.com*
More books by Michael Crichton*
If you could visit any point in history, would you trust a private corporation
to be the one to ‘host’ your journey?
Zohar — Man of la Book
Disclaimer: I bought this book
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