The Chronoliths

Rating:
Summary: What a cool book!
Review: I am not an avid "stars & spaceships" kind of reader & am very picky about any book that lays claim to the genre "Science Fiction". I like a book with a good plot line and very well developed set of characters. Many so-called great Sci-Fi writers do not meet these criteria. Other writers (Robert J. Sawyer comes to mind) manage this combination very well. I had read Darwinia by Mr. Wilson and was unimpressed. Until a good friend with excellent taste in books recommended 'The Chronoliths' it had been my intention to pass on any other Robert Charles Wilson offerings.

Grudgingly, I picked up a copy and began to read. I was instantly captivated. The characters developed well and the plot line was flawless. It was not at all predictable, with many directions that the book could go right up to the excellent ending. The only bad thing about this book is that it ends.

Now I intend to go back and try some of Mr. Wilson's other books. If any of them are half as good as 'The Chonoliths', I will be very happy with my purchase.

Final comment:
If you like near future, well written Sci-Fi, this book is for you. If you're looking for aliens, starships, and intergalactic war - this book will not provide those things. But read it anyway, you won't be disappointed. This is easily one of the best books I have read in 2002 (try Robert J Sawyer's 'Hominids' for my best book of the year, so far) and I highly recommend it as a good, solid read.

Rating:
Summary: A good story, extraordinarily well told
Review: I haven't read any of Robert Charles Wilson's other books, so I don't know how typical this one is of his output. But it's a darned fine book. It's difficult to review it without including any spoilers, but I won't give away any details that you wouldn't learn in the first few pages.

Here's the deal: It's 2021, and software developer Scott Warden is hanging out in Thailand with his wife and daughter when a big giant monument just sort of _appears_ out of nowhere, causing massive damage and death. What's even odder is that an inscription on the monument (dubbed a "Chronolith" by journalists) makes clear that it commemorates some sort of military victory by somebody named "Kuin" -- twenty years and three months in the future.

The rest of the story, of course, I'm not going to tell you. But it's very cool.

It will probably take you eighty or a hundred pages to get your mind around Warden (at least it did me). He's not in general a very sympathetic character, but give him time to grow on you; he's as interestingly flawed as, say, Charlie Armstead in Spider and Jeanne Robinson's _Stardance_, and you'll find that there _are_ reasons he's the way he is.

You'll also like Sulamith (Sue) Chopra, an academic odd duck who is both an engaging character and a handy person to have around for another reason.

See, most of the actual _science_ in this book takes place offstage, and Wilson relies on a device that's at least as old as Dr. John H. Watson's chronicles of Sherlock Holmes: there really _is_ some science behind the events in the novel, but the narrator isn't the one who knows it, so he conveniently doesn't have to explain it. Well, Sue Chopra does know it, and she gets to give little bits of pseudo-explanation in terms of "tau turbulence" and such -- but since Warden, rather implausibly, just can't get a handle on her explanations, the reader never really learns much about it. (That's the main reason I deducted a star from the book's rating.)

But boy, does the narrative draw you in. You'll probably have a hard time putting it down. You won't have any trouble keeping the characters straight, either; Wilson paces things nicely and gets everybody properly introduced. And it does all come together in the end, very neatly.

Don't expect a hope-filled, Spider-Robinson-like resolution, though; this is a pretty dark book and the characters are put pretty thoroughly through the mill.

(By the way, extra points to Tor Books for a very nice piece of cover art. Unlike Baen, Tor seems to have its covers designed by people who actually read the books, and that view of the giant Chronolith next to the Wat comes straight out of the text.)

Rating:
Summary: A mind-bending game of causality
Review: It's hard to say much about the book with giving it away. Let's say that there are two main currents in the work. The first is the puzzle of determing what Kuin's role in sending back the Chronoliths is; a commemoration of victory or an attempt to shape the past in order to make that victory happen?

There is also the growth of the central character, in terms of dealing with several loose ends in his life (such as the breakup of his marriage) and finding out what is the relationship between him, the Chronoliths and the other characters who are also involved with the Chronoliths. One of the strongest parts of the book is seing the complex way in which they tie in.

There's a convincing atmosphere of suspense and impending doom as accounts of the Chronoliths showing up in more and more cities (heralding Kuin's future advance) with especially strong scenes regarding appearances in Jerusalem and Mexico. This is also imparted the by protagonist's references to the economic and political chaos that accompanied the Chronoliths' arrival.

Also interesting is the reaction of humanity, with many people prepared to welcome Kuin.

Without giving the ending away, I had to run it through my head a couple of times to get the logic of it. That is not a criticism, it simply marks the author's effective use of manipulating cause-and-effect as one of his main plot devices.

Rating:
Summary: Dark but strangely romantic
Review: "The Chronoliths" was written in this century, and it deals with 21st-century physics; but it reads like a mid-century tale. Mid-nineteenth-century that is. With its mysterious shimmering monoliths, which arrive from the future and commemorate the victories of a warlord named Kuin (always 20 years and three months into the future), you're immediately hooked. Where are they coming from? Who is Kuin? How does he manage this? How can he be stopped? And yet, while it's a member in good standing of the classic, "problem solving" sf subgenre, the book has in its dark heart the same feeling you get with a Hawthorne or Melville novel, and its worldview is quite similar.

Mr. Wilson's approach isn't the standard sf "everybody pulls together to fight off the new menace." Instead (and maybe he's closer to the truth) the world breaks into factions: some passively wait for the inevitable and hope to make the best deal, like Chamberlain at Munich; others intend to actively and violently welcome the arrival of Kuin, and still others try to figure out how to destroy the monuments.

Mr. Wilson creates a grim future of financial collapse and social unrest, and it's convincing. There is a gripping sequence set in Jerusalem, where one of the chronoliths is about to arrive, that you won't soon forget; and if nothing is exactly explained in the end, there's no deus ex machina either, which can be the bane of problem-solving driven sf..

The story is told in the first person by the clueless narrator, Scott Warden (you might just as well call him Ishmael, if it weren't for his always managing to do the wrong thing at the right time). When it comes to particle physics he knows about as much as most of us, but since he was present at the creation, he's always along for the ride when events get interesting. He's the only one who could have told the tale: he's normal and everybody else is obsessed.

Rating:
Summary: What a waste
Review: The plot showed so much promise:
Giant monuments to wars which havn't happened yet start appearing. It becomes apparent that they have been sent back in time, though this could be some kind of psychological ploy by the victor, to make everyone feel defeated so they won't put up much of a fight.

The people researching the chronoliths discover that the wars were won by time travel, and wonder if it is in fact they, who are researching the only evidence they have that time travel is possible (the chronoliths) are the ones who in fact invent the technology that allow the wars to happen in the first place.

Sadly however, though the book is superbly written, pieces of it generating suspense and dread worthy of Iain Banks' "The Wasp Factory" the plot ends up leaping around like a drunk baboon on the rare occasions it is referred to at all. Eventually you just don't care what happens to the protagonists.

This book would get no stars as it is such a dissapointing read and a vicious waste of a superb idea. It is only by virtue of the technical writing ability of the author that allows it to scrape 2.

Rating:
Summary: classic RCW
Review: Robert Charles Wilson has a theme in his books. Take an extraordinary circumstance but, rather than focus on that, study how people caught up in it react. Sometimes the characters have no idea what actually is happening as all they have to go by is the consequences of the event. His style reminds me a lot of the Kurt Busiek's Astro City in that we see everything through the lens of what the characters know, not from the lens of a future history book. If you are curious about how people would react in a situation instead of wanting all of the details of what exactly happened, Robert Charles Wilson is a fascinating writer.

Rating:
Summary: a small comeback after "Darwinia"
Review: As a long time reader of Robert Charles Wilson books, I've come to the conclusion that he's been in a slump lately. Darwinia, his previous novel, had an amazing premise but a muddled plot and little dramatic action on the part of the characters, which propelled earlier works like The Harvest and The Divide. His new one, The Chronoliths, resets the balance somewhat. There is a more active plot, and Wilson is never better than when he wraps his ideas around a ticking time bomb of a story. His Characters are a bit better defined in this one also, I find I enjoy his books more when his settings and characters are contemporary. Since I don't dislike period books per se, I believe that he actually writes stronger when using the here and now as his starting point. You should search around for some of his hard to find earlier stuff, but this book makes a nice addition to his literary niche.

Rating:
Summary: Give it up for Kuin!
Review: It is the early 21st century. Scott Warden, a computer programmer educated at Cornell, lounges on the beaches of Thailand, wasting away his days in that great, wondering indifference we call youth. The fact that Scott has a wife and a baby daughter named Kaitlin isn't much of a concern, except when his wife and him are arguing. Most of the time, Scott hangs out with his drug-dealing buddy, Hitch. Life isn't great, but its good enough to avoid getting a new job and taking care of his responsibilities. Unfortunately for Scott, fate is about to deliver him a wake-up call that will change the rest of his life. An enormous structure appears suddenly in the jungle of Thailand. Scientific tests fail to discover anything meaningful about the object. The only thing known for sure about the object is an inscription written on the monument celebrating a military victory twenty years in the future by a mysterious figure named Kuin.

During the course of the next two decades, more monuments, now called chronoliths, appear throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Mexico. What everyone fears is the appearance of a chronolith in the United States. Paralleling the appearance of the chronoliths runs the course of Scott's life. Shortly after the first few chronoliths appear, an old college professor Scott met at Cornell, named Sue Chopra, contacts Scott. Chopra wants Scott to help her investigate the chronoliths by using his computer code writing abilities. Sue is an expert in physics who thinks she can reverse the appearance of the chronoliths, and she thinks Scott's presence in Thailand is linked to her solution.

On one level, this is pure science fiction. Weird coincidences, high-level physics, and the chronoliths themselves all meld together into a brilliantly conceived, and executed, novel. Time travel is a favorite sci-fi theme, but in this book it seems different. Spaceships aren't zooming into the past or the future. All we get are these strange objects. What do they mean and who is Kuin? How in the heck is it possible to send these objects through time a mere twenty years from the present, when time travel is still impossible?

On a second level, and a level much more meaningful for me, is the study of Scott and humanity in general. Their reactions to the chronoliths and the mysterious Kuin make up most of the novel. Some people support Kuin, and try to live their lives to that goal. Others, such as Sue, oppose the chronoliths and think there is a way out. People like Scott go back and forth; at times opposing the chronoliths, at other times just trying to survive in a rapidly disintegrating world. The book is, in this way, more of a sociological/psychological novel than mere science fiction.

I also found the writing style appealing. The whole story is supposed to be Scott writing about events after they have occurred, in the future. The passivity of Scott in the narrative gave me a feeling of hopelessness about how events would turn out. His replies to people are almost disinterested as though he recognizes that fighting against the future is hopeless (which it is, of course). I thought it added to the story in a good way.

An original and exciting plot, good characters who are well drawn, and a heck of an ending make this book an excellent read. If you're thinking about reading some good sci-fi, "The Chronoliths" is a tremendous place to start.

Rating:
Summary: Hoping for More
Review: The book didn't live up to my expectations based on the title and early comments. I was hoping for a little more hard science and storyline regarding the time travel elements of the Chronoliths, but there was precious little. Still, the prose was okay and interesting in sections, making it a good late night read when I wasn't up to anything that required much thinking.

Rating:
Summary: A delight in realistic composition.
Review: No romance, heroism or neat plot devices. How refreshing! I read this book in the span of a few days and found it to be engaging, intelligent and somewhat reassuring. The phenomenon of the appearance of the Chronoliths (as well as the destruction they cause upon arrival) are an exotic mystery that soon fades to old news and later still a cultural revolution for all the wrong reasons. The Chronoliths commemorate the future military victories over the places they arrive by a leader named Kuin. All the while more appear regularly, destructively and more and more people see their messages as a reality yet to come. The characters are not richly textured, at least not in the obvious sense, but this is a good thing. Despite their lack of strong personality drawing the reader into the book they are convincingly rendered as people in real life rather than the caricatures of people who seem to populate what passes for popular fiction. Their might be some who dislike the fact that the Chronoliths do not remain as exotic as they're description in the book's synopsis but there is a great reason for this; smart people are figuring things out from the very start. Like true scientists they are de-mystifying and trying to bring the strange down to earth. I found this angle to be very realistic and encouraging. The lead scientist, Sulamith Chopra, is a quirky woman who applies the scientific method as well as wielding a new theory to expound on the elements which are so alluring to those who look to the Chronoliths as guides to the future they believe to be inevitable. The man telling the tale, Scott Warden, is inextricably linked to the Chronoliths, as are several others. His life is not heroic (or particualrly special), but he does have keen insights which make him a good observer and more objective than then those reactionaries who need answers, today, or conform to whatever is convenient. He's a smart guy but no savior/savant. All he really wants is to be a family man after a youth spent pursuing shallow goals and blowing his first marriage by endangering his daughter to the hazards of living poorly in the third world Thai beach community among other restless expatriates. Leaving out a lot of the details is my way of hoping you'll read this book instead of coming away from this review thinking you've got the story. Is it worth a read? Here's hoping you think so because I really enjoyed this book and it's characters and situations.One unique side affect that came after reading this book is that for the first couple of weeks I looked at friends and family asking myself which of them were potential "Kuinists"?