- Hardcover: 364 pages
- Publisher: Ace Books (Jun 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0441012817
- ISBN-13: 978-0441012817
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,834,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
The quality of John Varley's very best writing is quite out of this world. When he's not at his very best he's still pretty good. This book is very good.
Billionaire Howard Christian, a character who appears to be loosely based on Howard Hughes but makes him look normal, has been seeking to clone a mammoth. His agents find a superb specimen which has been well preserved in frozen ice for 12,000 years and start digging it out to begin the process. Then they find beside the mammoth the frozen bodies of a man and a woman who also appear to have been there for 12,000 years - but the man is wearing a wristwatch and holding an unusual artifact.
That is only the start of some seriously weird events. The plot has a lot of twists and turns, some of which the reader may see coming but most of which probably won't turn out in quite the way you expect.
Interspersed in the text, with a little chunk of about two pages at a time between each chapter of the main narrative, is the story of a mammoth called Fuzzy from his conception and birth in about 10,000 BC to - well, you'll have to read it to see.
Character development in the book is fairly good, although Varley has done better. Howard Christian is a very strange individual who has lots of obsessions and you keep wondering if he is going to flip over to outright evil. His chief fixer is a man called Warburton who might have been interesting to explore in more depth but appears in most of the book as a shadowy figure who organises whatever Christian wants done. At the very end of the story Warburton takes on a bit more personality, as does Christian's filmstar girlfriend, Andrea de la Terre.
The main sympathetic human character is Matt Wright, a scientist who specialises in the physics of time and who is brought in by Christian to investigate some peculiar artifacts found with the frozen man. Another sympathetic human character is Susan Morgan, an elephant handler brought in to look after the elephants involved in Christian's attempts to clone the mammoth. Neither Matt nor Susan is a creation in the same league as Varley's best characters such as Sirocco Jones or Gaby, but both are sufficiently well drawn as to make you care about what happens to them. The most interesting characters in the book are the elephants and mammoths, several of whom Varley manages to invest with real but plausible personality.
I doubt if this one will add to Varley's stock of Nebula and Hugo awards, but it does qualify as extremely entertaining and well worth a read.
Billionaire Howard Christian, a character who appears to be loosely based on Howard Hughes but makes him look normal, has been seeking to clone a mammoth. His agents find a superb specimen which has been well preserved in frozen ice for 12,000 years and start digging it out to begin the process. Then they find beside the mammoth the frozen bodies of a man and a woman who also appear to have been there for 12,000 years - but the man is wearing a wristwatch and holding an unusual artifact.
That is only the start of some seriously weird events. The plot has a lot of twists and turns, some of which the reader may see coming but most of which probably won't turn out in quite the way you expect.
Interspersed in the text, with a little chunk of about two pages at a time between each chapter of the main narrative, is the story of a mammoth called Fuzzy from his conception and birth in about 10,000 BC to - well, you'll have to read it to see.
Character development in the book is fairly good, although Varley has done better. Howard Christian is a very strange individual who has lots of obsessions and you keep wondering if he is going to flip over to outright evil. His chief fixer is a man called Warburton who might have been interesting to explore in more depth but appears in most of the book as a shadowy figure who organises whatever Christian wants done. At the very end of the story Warburton takes on a bit more personality, as does Christian's filmstar girlfriend, Andrea de la Terre.
The main sympathetic human character is Matt Wright, a scientist who specialises in the physics of time and who is brought in by Christian to investigate some peculiar artifacts found with the frozen man. Another sympathetic human character is Susan Morgan, an elephant handler brought in to look after the elephants involved in Christian's attempts to clone the mammoth. Neither Matt nor Susan is a creation in the same league as Varley's best characters such as Sirocco Jones or Gaby, but both are sufficiently well drawn as to make you care about what happens to them. The most interesting characters in the book are the elephants and mammoths, several of whom Varley manages to invest with real but plausible personality.
I doubt if this one will add to Varley's stock of Nebula and Hugo awards, but it does qualify as extremely entertaining and well worth a read.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Sometimes scientific advances are pushed into being by people who have no real interest in the science itself, but rather have an agenda of their own, often based on crass materialism, that drives the research as merely a sidelight to that goal. This book helps illustrate that point, as we find Howard Christian trying to develop a modern day version of a mammoth via DNA cloning, but in looking for source DNA material stumbles across not only a frozen mammoth, but a frozen man right beside it wearing a wristwatch and with a briefcase that just might be a time machine.
Howard hires mathematician Matt Wright, who has some new ideas in the area of time travel, to fix and/or duplicate that machine. Wright's investigation into the machine's operation eventually leads to a real trip back in time, for himself and Susan Morgan, an elephant handler who was hired by Christian to handle the result of the DNA cloning effort. The result of that trip, and the mayhem it does to modern Los Angeles, forms the balance of this story.
Each of the three characters is fairly well delineated, more than well enough to carry the story and drive the conflict. But there is a fourth character, a baby mammoth, whose story is told separately in interstitial chapters (styled as a young children's story), that actually may be the best portion of this book, as through this story the past of 15,000 years ago comes alive - the described environment, animals, climate, and behaviors of the mammoth herd all contribute to a sense of 'being there'.
Not so good is the basic plot, as it almost seems as if the story line was constructed with Hollywood in mind, with certain scenes just made for 'trailers', and too little work being done to really delve into the paradoxes that time travel (at the macro level) almost necessarily entails, even though such items drive the final resolution of the story. Varley has done much better in this area previously, and this work suffers by comparison with that earlier work and also in comparison to other works that have dealt with time travel, from Heinlein's "All You Zombies" to Asimov's The End of Eternity.
The net is that this is a good entertainment level novel, well written and engaging, with some good insights into the environment of the past, but has little to offer in terms of deeper meaning or any new twists on this type of story.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
If you read the blurb on the back you think you can guess the plot. You'd be wrong.
A dead mammoth, a millionaire and a time machine, could make for a silly romp, but of course John Varley is too good an author not to come up with something more thoughtful than that. The science is accurate as always and he obviously knows a lot about mammoths.
The exciting story line and well rounded characters keep you hooked to the very end.
A dead mammoth, a millionaire and a time machine, could make for a silly romp, but of course John Varley is too good an author not to come up with something more thoughtful than that. The science is accurate as always and he obviously knows a lot about mammoths.
The exciting story line and well rounded characters keep you hooked to the very end.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
