The Chronoliths takes the same broad theme of Wilson’s later novel Spin (mysterious giant objects appear around the globe) and uses it to frame a bleak look at a near-future where environmental and economic collapse have left the world vulnerable to military conquest on a level not seen since World War II. The twist is that the conquest is set to happen twenty years in the future and is foretold by the arrival of chronoliths, giant towers of indestructible stone and ice that commemorate the victories of someone or something only identified as Kuin.
With chronoliths spreading from Asia to South America and beyond, and pro and anti-Kuin forces forming, the story follows software developer Scott Warden as he witnesses the arrival of the first chronolith in Thailand and then becomes entangled in what Warden’s former teacher and scientist Sue Chopra calls “tau turbulence” in the quest to stop both the chronoliths and Kuin.
Written in 2001 and predating the 9/11 attacks, The Chronoliths is informed by a present that didn’t anticipate the arrival of the smartphone (it predates the launch of the iPhone by six years) and as such, even though it depicts a mid-21st century where video phones and terminals are commonplace, it feels ever-so-slightly out of date. This is not a real criticism, just a reflection on the likelihood of science fiction that chronicles near-future events not quite hitting the mark. Predicting the future is tricky business, which is ironically (and as Chopra would point out, not coincidentally) what the story is about. Reading the novel when it was published in 2001, these incongruities are non-existent. In 2016 you just have to keep the story in context of when it was written.
That said, the story moves along briskly and Wilson quickly ensnares Morgan, his friends and family into the future of the chronoliths, making Morgan’s actions and decisions both momentous and personal. He may not necessarily want to save the world, taking a rather jaundiced view of it, but he does want to save the people he loves. As more chronoliths appear and Kuin’s victory seems more and more inevitable, the tone becomes increasingly one of despair and hopelessness. Told from the first person perspective, the character of Scott Morgan deliberately feeds into this, framing the tale as one in which many terrible things happen. And they do!
I won’t spoil the ending but Wilson does kind of pull a rabbit out of a hat and it works. As with most stories that have a time travel element it’s best if you don’t try to pull the logic apart. In the case of The Chronoliths, Wilson makes that easy with a style that effortlessly moves the plot along.
Sorry, had to get the inevitable and terrible pun out of the way.
11/22/63 is one of King’s best post-accident (post-1999) works, a long and adventurous novel that jumps feet-first into the time travel paradox. As expected, giving much thought to the logistics of time travel only reveals the gaps and flaws common to this particular sub-genre of science fiction. King knows this, too, and steers clear of trying to provide plausible scientific reasoning, leaving it up to the butterfly effect and what the main character of school teacher Jake Epping calls “harmonics.”
Saving Kennedy is a favorite time-travel trope, probably the most popular after killing Hitler, and King neatly lays out the scenario where Epping goes back to September 1958 and adapts to living for five years in an era before he was born, all the while tracking his prey, Lee Harvey Oswald. Along the way Epping falls in love with both the past and another school teacher, the tough if clumsy Sadie Dunhill.
Typically, King does a terrific job in fleshing out the many characters, while the sounds and sights of late 50s and early 60s America feel authentic. The story sprawls but never drags as Epping faces obstacle after obstacle while moving closer to his target. As the repeated refrain goes, the past is obdurate and doesn’t want to be changed.
To say more would venture into spoiler territory and although the book has what amounts to two endings, both are fine. There are no giant spiders here. 😛
Unlike King’s horror fare, 11/22/63 has broader appeal, to fans of time travel stories, to those who enjoy the whole “fish out of water” thing and finally, to anyone who enjoys watching characters whose actions and complexities drive the action, rather than the other way around.
I suspect many if not most people who first encounter Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea think the title refers to how deep the Nautilus dives. Going by the conservative measure of a league being four km, that would equal 80,000 km and put the Nautilus in outer space, which is indeed a long way down.
But even when considered correctly as distance traveled, twenty thousand leagues is a lot of ocean to cover. And in Jules Verne’s classic novel, the protagonist and narrator Pierre Aronnax provides an episodic recollection of the many months he and two others spend as captors aboard the submarine Nautilus, held there by the mysterious and perhaps mad Captain Nemo.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this nearly 150 year old novel is how well the science holds up. Unlike his more fanciful efforts such as Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea depicts an eerily realistic electric-powered submarine. The story is a curious blend of exploration and travelogue, with odd dashes of humor mixed in with bursts of action or violence. More harrowing than the squid attack made famous in the 1954 Disney film is the depiction of the Nautilus becoming trapped under ice while in the Antarctic, with the crew struggling to break the vessel free before their supply of oxygen runs out. You may never want to step foot in a submarine if afforded the opportunity.
Despite the occasional action, most of the story is presented in a deliberate fashion that may feel slow or even ponderous to those accustomed to our information-overload culture. This is a tale to be savored for the sights, sounds and other sensations presented. The arc of Nemo would no doubt be handled more forcefully in a modern telling, as he begins and ends as an enigma here, but other than the “I hit my head and suddenly it was all over” ending (perhaps due to the novel originally being a magazine serial), I enjoyed the more leisurely pace. Considering the dual facts that the novel relies so much on science and was published in 1870, it is all the more amazing how sturdy it still stands.
For anyone interested in the history of science fiction, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is an essential read.
Prometheus is the sort-of prequel to Alien. I say sort of because the events don’t lead directly into Alien but rather lay some of the groundwork for the series. Sort of. Unfortunately that groundwork is a shambles, hobbled by a muddled script and characters that serve as little more than vessels for plot devices. The saving grace, as one might expect of a Ridley Scott film, are the visuals. They are arresting and spectacular but ultimately provide nothing more than a gloss to a rather poorly-made movie.
Starting from the premise of disparate ancient civilizations all producing the same star map, Prometheus goes on to have billionaire Peter Weyland in the year 2093 launch a ‘trillion dollar’ space expedition (so I guess he’s actually a trillionaire) to find the ‘engineers’ that apparently seeded life on Earth and inspired the star maps of all the different ancient civilizations. The expedition features the titular space ship and a crew of 17 whose names are conveniently written across the front of their space helmets so the audience can remember who is who.
They arrive at LV-223, just a hop and skip over from the infamous LV-426, home of face huggers and other bad things but no one on the Prometheus knows anything about aliens with double mouths, acidic blood and a strong desire to kill all humans. They are on a mission of science! Except they actually aren’t because the infirm Weyland, who has faked his death for no apparent reason, is secretly onboard the ship and hopes the engineers will help save him from his old man disease or make him young again or something because if they could make humans, surely they can fix old man disease, right? Right.
Also onboard is Vickers, who is revealed late in the movie to be his daughter, as if it’s supposed to be a shocking moment. Her character is the alleged commander of the mission, though she seems hostile and indifferent to everyone and everything, possibly related to unspoken daddy issues. Her character is completely superfluous and unlikeable as a bonus. That she gets squashed by a rolling space ship would be considered a small payoff if it didn’t come so late in the film.
Naturally there is also an android, this time played by Michael Fassbender. He is the son Weyland never had or some nonsense like that. Mainly it seems like every Alien movie, even a sort-of prequel, needs an android so here is David. David might be described as a paranoid android, as he engages in a lot of quirky and vaguely (and sometimes overtly) menacing behavior. While Fassbender is interesting to watch, the character is a puzzle piece that is never explained, an Ash without motive.
After discovering artificial structures on the surface of LV-226 — by someone literally spotting them through a window on the Prometheus — the movie sets about with the worst science team in the history of forever exploring the mysteries therein. It starts with cool shots of ATVs scooting off of Prometheus and heading to the structures because there seems to be a rule that you can’t park your space ship close enough to just walk over. Maybe they were worried about getting a ticket.
The crack team begins its work. As they enter the structure the doctor guy notes that it has a breathable atmosphere (explanation: none). To prove it he laughs, takes off his helmet then laughs some more. When he doesn’t keel over dead everyone takes off their helmets. This is bad procedure for several reasons. Firstly, without knowing the source of the breathable atmosphere you also don’t know if the unknown source might suddenly cut off, leaving you to die within seconds from the otherwise deadly poisonous air. Secondly, with their helmets off it makes it that much harder to remember the character names.
After finding a room filled with vases that leak black goo that is probably alive, possibly sentient and very bad indeed, the crew returns to the ship. But no one notices that two of the crew have wandered off. One is a geologist who is ‘in it for the money’ and shows his contempt for the mission via a Mohawk haircut and piping weed through his space helmet. But he does have fancy probes that scoot through the alien structure and map its interior. Then he gets lost. The guy with the mapping probes.
Getting lost with him is the biologist. He goes back to the room filled with mysterious and seemingly alive black goo. When the goo resolves itself into a snake-like thing that rises out of the goo, the biologist does what any trained professional would do — he leans forward and tries to pet it like a kitten. He ends up being killed by the snake, which is pretty surprising! Didn’t see that coming.
Meanwhile the android infects a doctor onboard Prometheus with the goo for no given reason. The doctor starts to Go Bad but it’s okay because Vickers is there to ice (er) him with a flamethrower. Also the geologist, who got lost with the biologist, turns into a zombie but he gets taken out, too. Then Vickers sleeps with the ship’s captain. Or maybe that happened before. Anyway, the doctor also sleeps with his wife, whose name is SHAW because that is on her helmet. Shaw becomes pregnant with a babby except it was earlier revealed that she can’t get pregnant but now she is — HOW WEIRD IS THAT? She tears off into a room with an all-purpose medical pod and programs it to REMOVE THE BABBY. Except the medical pod is made for men only, kind of like Dr. Pepper or Irish Spring soap. Shaw is smarter than the machine, though, so she orders it to just cut open her stomach and yoink out whatever is in there (well, not her stomach, obviously, but whatever she might be ‘pregnant’ with). The machine complies and in loving detail pulls out a tentacled something or other that squirms about terrifically in the pincers that hold it. Shaw leaves after getting her stomach stapled and thanks to advanced 21st century drugs seems no worse the wear.
So, the black goo. It apparently is what creates or modifies life. The engineers abandoned the goo moon of LV-226 but left piles of their ships buried beneath its surface for some reason (the ships are the same as the one discovered at the start of Alien). They dress up in suits that explain the look of the famous Space Jockey from Alien. There are weird holographic ‘security camera’ projections that show these guys all fleeing in terror from something then dying somehow in a big pile. Why these holograms show them running but never reveal what they are running from is never explained. Maybe the tell-all hologram got corrupted by black goo. One of the engineers had his head cut off so the crew take this two thousand year old head back to the ship and somehow their medical machinery revives it and it explodes. SCIENCE.
All right, it seems they aren’t getting the answers they want here what with everyone dying and things exploding, but Weyland is not to be deterred. There is a single life sign being picked up by lost dead geologist’s probes and they find out that it’s an engineer in a stasis tube. David the android has been studying their language, which I guess did not evolve in any way over thousands of years, and speaks a few words of greeting to the engineer after they force him to wake up. The engineer rips David’s head off and kills everyone he can get his tremendously large albino hands on. This is what you call waking up in a bad mood. SHAW and VICKERS escape.
Back on the ship, the captain (who is not actually in charge of anything except for flying the ship) and two crew whose names I can’t recall because they never got helmets and only had a few lines each thinks it might be time to leave. The engineer thinks the same thing and jumps into the pilot seat of his Uterean craft. David the android tells Shaw, who escapes the alien ship, that the engineer is going to deliver some goo to Earth. Probably not a good thing for Earth. Shaw tells the captain the alien ship must be stopped but they are a team of SCIENCE , not the military so the best the captain can do is ram the Prometheus into the alien ship as it takes off. Which he does. Shaw and Vickers are scrabbling about on the surface as the alien ship comes crashing down in slow motion. Shaw leaps out of the way but Vickers forgets how physics works and as the alien ship rolls like a giant wheel toward her, she keeps running away from it in a straight line, hoping that somehow she will outrun it. She does not and gets smooshed.
Shaw goes back to the lifeboat/medical pod left behind and oh dear, that tentacled thing is now 50 times its original size and probably hungry. David the android’s head is still functional despite being removed from his body and landed conveniently close enough to a communication device. He contacts Shaw and warns her that the engineer is out and about. Sure enough he shows up and is very mad because they smashed his ride and he’ll show that woman what’s what. Shaw then introduces tentacled thing to the engineer and escapes again. The tentacled thing shoves a tentacle down the engineer’s throat in order to deliver a final shot SURPRISE.
Shaw and David the android’s head decide to commandeer another alien ship (remember, the moon is littered with them) and take off to the engineer’s home planet because, well, because.
THE END.
Okay, looking over this, I realize it’s more a plot summary than a review but in summarizing I am hoping to capture how inane, illogical and plain dumb the plot is. This is a movie trying to be deep, profound and meaningful and failing. And it fails because Alien was a neat horror movie set in space and trying to build it up into more was a bad idea in the first place. It also fails even when you strip away its metaphysical musings and simply take it as a horror/action movie because it is neither scary nor filled with satisfying action.
But yes, the visuals are great.
I give Prometheus 4 out of 10 Uterean ships and one of those is for the visual effects. Maybe two.
I recommend checking out this Broken forum thread on the movie for a rollercoaster ride of anticipation, disappointment, resignation and in a few odd cases, absolute love for what Ridley Scott hath wrought.
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson
