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Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past-and soon to be haunted by the future. In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory--sixteen years in the future. Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok-obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note? Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange loop of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future. The Chronoliths is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel and the winner of the 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.… (more)
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What did I enjoy about it? I'd recently read (or tried to, at least) a few books set in a far-ish future where so much had changed that the pleasure of reading was replaced with the arduous task of trying to assimilate an almost entirely new
Unfortunately, very little happened. We followed a tiresome, uninteresting protagonist (the true hero, Sue, was a minor supporting character ... why do authors do this?). He had no discernible personality. Nothing much happened (well, things happened, but they weren't interesting things, and they didn't really build upon each other to lead to other more interesting things ... you know, the way a Plot ought to). By the end of the book, when a character was randomly raped (there must be a trope ought there somewhere for trying to goad readers into caring by raping dull characters), I was so over it.
The men are all manly and the women are "the wife," "the girlfriend," etc., save for the aforementioned Sue. I'm a man, and found this annoying. It doesn't pass the Bechdel test either. Sometimes I wonder if certain authors mentally cast their books ... maybe Mr. Wilson is picturing Duane "The Rock" Johnson playing his protagonist, and he's chortling with glee as he imagines how much fun the character would be. But we're not picturing that, so we get Joe Bland saying boring things as he drifts around the dull book.
Not a fan, I'm afraid.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
The world these people, including our protagonist Scotty, live in is never directly addressed, but is rather described in passing as Scotty tries to eke out a living and support his family. The details are evocative, and I’d love to read more about this very-near future world which seems all too plausible considering current events.
The events in this story, primarily the mysterious arrival of the monuments, are not the main focus, but rather form a backdrop to the story of family man Scot and his struggle to be a good person & protect his family while the world fragments around them. The characterizations are powerful, and it is rewarding to see Scot evolve into the kind of person he wants to be, and to try to make a difference.
This is not a book to rush through. I would have liked things explained a bit better at the end, but perhaps that has contributed to the impact the book had for me – I have been thinking about the story for days, trying to work out exactly what did happen and why. I am not sure I have arrived at a conclusion yet, but it is thought provoking and worth pondering…a very good book.
Not that the story ends without hope, because it does. But I asked myself as I turned the final page if, even as we learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. The central idea of time travel is paired with the idea of belief, and how what we expect to be true or significant (or moral, or just … I could go on) informs the landscape of our future. In a way, we are all constantly time-traveling, remembering the parts of our past to paint us in our best light, only seeing the interesting and shiny parts of our present. We build the future; we build our monuments to the future.
Once again, Robert Charles Wilson asks important questions and leaves it to us to find our own answers.
This novel probably has some unintended effects from it being published post-September 11th since it deals with terrorism of a sort.
It's an effectively done first-person narration presented as the narrator's memoirs.
The central idea of
Wilson, who lives in Toronto, doesn't do all that great of a job evoking the Twin Cities of Minnesota even if he mentions place names like Nicollet Mall. However, I smiled at his invocation of their politics, however unintentional that commentary was. The Copperhead contingent, of which the narrator's ex-wife's husband belongs, is strong there. Named after the Northern appeasers in the Civil War, the Copperheads preach appeasement, adjustment, and the possibile benefits of aligning themselves with Kuin when he finally shows. (The monuments have inscriptions, and the inscription on the first one is allegedly from twenty years in the future.)
The plot is tied together by a tight knot of temporal paradox and coincidences that aren't really coincidences but, as mathematical physicist Sulamith Chopra, the result of "tau-turbulence". The mathematics that allow the Chronoliths also enable space travel.
A slick, fast, thoroughly engrossing read with an interesting take on the psychology of military conquest.
There were some interesting ideas here, but the story itself fell a bit flat. I think it is a fascinating premise, but Wilson didn't quite know what to do with it and it felt like the story just petered out at the end. I don't regret reading it, especially because I'm a big fan of time travel literature.
I listened to the audiobook, and it is read by one of my favorite narrators, Oliver Wyman, so I enjoyed the audiobook.
The book has interesting thoughts on the physics of time, the social effects of monuments (and self-fulfilling prophecies).
However, although the writing in this book is noticeably more masterful than in the earlier book I read by Wilson, the 'feel' of its style, I thought, was still very 'mainstream-thriller.
Hard science, intriguing characters and unfortunately believeable human reactions to the situation, make the book fascinating, in an aghast kind of way.
The Chronoliths is futuristic enough to acknowledge the world had progressed but not so much that it wasn't recognizable to the reader. Some examples: Scott lived in a society where smokers needed to hold an "addict's" license. Wilson makes some interesting predictions about human behavior and advances in technologies. Portable communication technologies are very similar to what we have today but were virtually unheard of in 2001.
But interestingly enough, the world had also regressed (the draft was introduced in 2029).