MILLENNIUM

John Varley's Millennium is a distinctly different type of time-travel book, and I enjoyed it. It's not as good as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, but what can compare to that all-time classic. The only comparison is that both novels were made into movies (I only saw the 1960 movie that starred Rod Taylor). This novel has an unusual plot. People from the future go into the past via a gate and exchange doomed crash victims with replacements called wimps. Since the Earth of the future is a dying planet due to thousands of years of wars and pollution, the people from the future built a spaceship to carry the healthy humans from the past to another planet or to a future Earth millions of years from now. The people from the future couldn't go because they didn't live long due to the poisoned air that they evolved to breath. So Earth's future was really its past.

The biggest concern during these "snatch" operations was to avoid paradoxes. One little mistake could change the future and eliminate mankind forever. For example, if you went into the past and killed your father, you wouldn't have been born and therefore unable to kill your father. Changing anything in the past could cause the catastrophic erasing of man. So when the future time travel team lost two stunner guns, one in 1955 and one in 1980, the panic was on, or you know what hit the fan!

The guns were lost on two separate plane crashes during the removal of the crash victims before the accidents occurred. The guns are used to stun the passengers so that they can be transferred through the gate and into a holding pen while the wimps take their place. The head of the future snatch team is Louise Baltimore, and the head of the past crash investigation team is Bill Smith. The two other meaningful characters in the book are the Big Computer and Louise's robot, Sherman (like the tank). Can Louise go back into the past and find these stun guns before Bill Smith?

The story seemed to flow easily enough, although certain things didn't make much sense or add anything of value to the book. For instance, when Bill Smith's group discovers that the crash victims all ate chicken during the flight - so what? And when Smith discovers that some of victim's watches ran 45 minutes fast and some ran backwards, I didn't understand what that meant. Anyway both matters were quickly dropped and never came up again. Other than that, the book was well written and thought out. I especially like the way most chapters were titled the Testimony of Bill Smith or Testimony of Louise Baltimore, as if the story was a trial in front of God...maybe it was. John Varley continues to make me happy with his ability to make all his scientific theories comprehensible.

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: The theory of time travel has always been a puzzlement to mankind. Would the laws of physics even allow travel to the future or the past? Causing paradoxes would be very feasible, thus creating potentially perilous situations. Great authors have dealt with this subject in some respects, such as Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle.