November 22, 2005
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson
Nothing is coincidental. I know that now.
Scott Warden is an expatriate slacker living with his family in Thailand. He has been taking a vacation from his life back in America, and also oblivious to his obligations as a parent. Everything about his life and the world changes when he is a witness to an amazing event: the violent appearance of 200-foot obelisk that is ultimately found to be made from an exotic form of matter and which carries an inscription that is in a pidgin Chinese-English commemorating a military victory by `Kuin` twenty years in the future. This event starts Scott Warden's lifetime obsession with the missives of Kuin mysteriously sent back to the past.
A few years later, a larger pillar arrives, without warning, in the center of Bangkok, destroying the city and killing thousands. Over the next few years, human society in Asia is transformed completely due to the continual arrivals of these monuments. In the meantime, Scott Warden has lost his family -- and he starts his lifetime struggle to remain relevant to his ex-wife and daughter.
But as he makes a livelihood he is obsessed with questions about the chronoliths. Is Kuin a new Alexander the Great or a new Genghis Khan sending a signal of his future victories back into time, or is he creating his own legend by sending back messages which are designed to transform human society so that it can be easily subjugated. Which of the many temporal paradoxes is Kuin exploiting in his plan? Can he be stopped? Can Kuin be stopped without knowing a priori who he is?
The Chronoliths is a story with central strong scientific idea, one that is implausible but nonetheless impacts on human society and our concepts of free will and determinism. Like his previous novel "Bios", The Chronoliths also has strong characters, each of them completely fleshed out by the end of the novel. The writing is also smooth and economical. All the revelations are rolled into the premise, so don't go into this novel expecting a big neat explication of time travel paradoxes at the end. There are some answers that are implicitly given by the end of the novel, but the casual reader might just miss them as they go by.
While entertaining, the novel does expect you to meet it half-way. While the novel uses several routine time-travel ideas (such as the many-worlds theory and time loops) it introduces some new ones, including the idea of feedback loops in time and Minkowski ice. The Chronoliths is a welcome addition to the crowded time-travel sf sub-genre.
%T The Chronoliths %A Robert Charles Wilson %I Tor Books %D 2001 :mass market edition 2002 %G ISBN: 0812545249 (pb) %P 315 %K science-fiction
Review written: 2002/06/18
Posted by anoop at November 22, 2005 11:08 PM