Millennium

This certainly was an interesting ride. Future girl and her future pals (many of whom have become more machine than people) rescues people doomed to die in accidents that claim all to save the human race from extinction. I won't elaborate because it would give away the ending, but an astute reader

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will get it in the first few chapters.

Two mistakes start a chain reaction that get an NTSB investigator questioning the evidence in a mid-air collision and she must go back and steer him away from the truth. She fails, which is the heart of the story.

I thought it was an interesting take on time travel, well written and with believable characters. All had glaring flaws that gave this tale a solid sense of reality.

I think the ending left something to be desired, but it did answer most of the questions.

Would I recommend it? Sure.

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When an acquaintance saw me reading this novel, he said, "I saw the movie they made of that." "I didn't know they made a movie," I said. "Yeah," he replied, "with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd." "Well," I said, "I'm going to have to see whether I can find it on Netflix or something."

When I

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looked into it, however, I suddenly remembered that I HAD seen the movie, and I thought it was pretty terrible.

The book is hardly better.

Here's the premise: before two planes go down after a mid-air collision, people arrive on board from the future to whoosh the passengers to their time, 50,000 years from now. FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS! Yet it's funny that these people from the future hardly speak or act or think any different from those in the 20th century. The leader of the future-people is a woman who looks like a movie star (they have movies 50,000 years from now?), and she chain-smokes Lucky Strikes (!). When she talks about the show her time machine can make when it arrives in our present, the metaphor she uses is of more noise than Times Square on New Year's Eve. (It's nice to know that 50,000 years from now, there still is a Times Square, and people are still celebrating New Year's there.)

Think about 50,000 years prior to our time. If we traveled back that far, our ancestors would barely be even recognizable to us. Does evolution, invention, and discovery, stop somehow in the 20th century, so that our descendants 50 millennia from now are barely different from our Old Country cousins?

The woman leader from the future is in fact quite a ridiculous character, and given she's one of the book's two protagonists, that's a real problem. And for all the discussion the future-people have about creating time-paradoxes through the use of their time machine, I don't think what happens once they mess with the timeline has any congruence with the arguments at all.

When I picked this book up, I was anticipating a light, fun read. But there were too many instances in which the text caused me to figuratively roll my eyes as to make me groan over it instead.

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This is a tie-in novel for the film version of Varley's own short story "Air raid". Most of the faults with this novel come from trying to flesh that story out to a mass-market film, with the compromises that have to be made for that exercise (such as injecting a punkish element to the visuals and

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character development). The original short story was, of course, better, but I retain a soft spot for the novel (and film), mainly because the basic story - time travellers rescue doomed passengers from air crashes to colonise the future because the Earth is ecologically doomed and the future humans too biologically and genetically compromised to be viable colonists - is the one I would most wish were true.

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Exciting time-travel. Reminded me vaguely of Michael Crichton's classics. Yet another sf that starts personal and goes galactic, even universal, like Sheffield.

The book opens as the investigation into the tragic collision of two jumbo jets near Oakland is commencing. Sections relating the details of the investigation are interspersed with sections set in a time hundreds of years in the future in which people travel back in time to incidents in which

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everyone is killed (i.e. plane crashes), stun the passengers, send them to the future, and replace them with already dead bodies from the future, just before the crash. But why?

As the present day investigation proceeds various anomalies are discovered and can't be explained. The future is also changing, as the result of errors the team sending people from the past into the future may have made.

This is the first book by Varley that I've read, and it was a good one. It was very logical and real--there were no, "I can't suspend my disbelief for this," moment, and I was kept turning the pages. Recommended.

3 stars

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Back in the early 1990s I fell into the habit of reading the novels which were being adapted into movies. This was a bad habit as I read a lot of rubbish, including "Millennium".

In the present, a plane crash investigator realises something odd is happening with the passengers, and, of all the

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possible reasons for the oddness, it turns out that its people 50 000 years in the future taking the passengers moments before the crash and sending them back to the future to help populate Earth. The sentence I just wrote actually makes the book sound more interesting than it is.

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five stars bcs this book kept me up, kept me turning the pages, kept me speculating and didn't let me down .

Made into a movie. SF novel about time-travelling meddlers from the future who chain-smoke. Really.