Customer Reviews

Mammoth

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've enjoyed everything by Varley I've ever read, and I've read nearly everything he's published.

I enjoyed this, too... but it's not his best book.

Another stand-alone novel, MAMMOTH is not a pseudo-juvenile like 2003's RED THUNDER, but it's simiilar in one respect: it explores some of the implications of an "impossible" technology. In RED THUNDER it was an unlimited energy source; in MAMMOTH it's a time machine. In neither book does Varley attempt much of an explanation for how the technology works; it's just there. The stories concern themselves with what happens to his characters when they get involved with it.

Self-made technology mega-millionaire Howard Christian wants all the best toys, and has few scruples about how he gets them and what he uses them for. One thing he wants is a real, live mammoth. He figures he can grow his own if he can find viable DNA in a frozen animal, so he sends out Arctic explorers to find one. What he doesn't count on is that the frozen mammoth is accompanied by a frozen human... wearing a wristwatch.

Susan Morgan is a circus veterinarian and elephant expert, hired by Christian to oversee the process of ineminating an elephant host mother with the mammoth embryo. And Matt Wright is the mathemetician brought in to decipher the mysteries of the time machine found inside a metal briefcase next to the frozen man.

But perhaps the most important character is Fuzzy, a baby mammoth whose story connects all the other narratives. The story of his life is told in a simple children's-book style narrative that parallels the main story. Born 13,000 years ago, his life intersects Susan and Matt's when they are accidentally thrown into the past. Their adventure in prehistoric North America is one of several exciting set-pieces in the book.

MAMMOTH isn't a good novel because it's about time-travel; it's good because it focuses on three interesting characters. Susan is compassionate but not naive, and capable of taking great risks when her conscience dictates. Matt is a scientist and genius mathemetician, but recognizes that there are ways of thinking and seeing the universe that are beyond his experience; Howard is venal and petty, selfish and dishonest, but capable of growth.

At the same time, while rich in description and vividly-depicted action, the book suffers from a thin plot. Varley knows where it's going, and it's a fine twist that will delight and satisfy the reader... but between the setup and the payoff are a couple hundred pages of action that feel stretched and padded. They're very enjoyable to read, but they don't enhance the plot much.

Nevertheless, John Varley writes with clarity and humor, creates likeable characters you want to root for, and places them in a story you'll be racing to finish. It's great entertainment, even if it's not the great science fiction novel Varley is capable of.

The trouble with writing a story in a well-worn science fiction trope like time travel is that you inescapably call to mind those who have travelled the subject before you. In "Mammoth," Varley follows in the footsteps of both Robert Heinlein - notably, "All You Zombies" - and Terry Pratchett's "Strata." It's still a rich field, but the footprints of your predecessors are always in sight.

Multi-billionaire Howard Christian wants to clone a mammoth. His expedition to the Canadian Arctic yields a mammoth carcass, all right, but even more surprising is the frozen man alongside, wearing a wrist watch and clutching a metal briefcase. The briefcase may or may not be a time machine. Christian, a brilliant inventor in his own right, hires young physics genius Matt Wright to create a functional time machine. Wright falls for young elephant vet and would-be mammoth trainer Susan Morgan. All of those geniuses and no one stops to wonder about who the corpsicle might be. Until it is too late.

Varley is a very good writer. He deftly changes the reader's perception of Howard Christian over the course of the novel. By the time we see Christian lurking in his armed fortress, 200 stories over the streets of Los Angeles, armed with a gigawatt laser; well, I certainly knew who might not be the good guy, benevolent billionaire after all.

My own opinion is that beginning with "Red Thunder" - or perhaps even "The Golden Globe" - Varley has consciously set up to do homages to Heinlein's juvenile science fiction novels of the 1950's. Varely's last two or three books are uncannily similar in tone, if not plot and characterization, to stories like "Red Planet" and "Rocket Ship Galileo." While Pratchett may have mercilessly parodied the "artifact from the future" - along with most other science fiction tropes - in "Strata," Varley demonstrates there are good yarns left in the themes Heinlein explored half a century or more ago.

I particularly enjoyed another Heinlein reference - "The Man Who Travelled in Elephants" - to which Varley gives the sly wink. A lot of references in "Mammoth" will Reward the Careful Reader.

This isn't the wildly imaginative John Varley of the Gaea trilogy, but read as a tribute or homage to other, earlier writers, this novel is still fun. If you haven't read the earlier writers who have explored the ideas underlying "Mammoth," this novel might be more exciting. But you'd be missing half of the pleasure.

You can read the boilerplate to figure out the gist of the story, no sense in me wasting your time with a rehash.

I am astounded and in awe of John Varley's imagination.

John Varley is one of the best writers/SF writers I have ever read.

John Varley is absolutely world class. I rank him with Howard Waldrop and Ted Sturgeon, among few others.

"Mammoth" is flat and, although I loyally read through to the end, tedious. It ranks right down there with "Red Thunder." A spark of imagination, coupled with cut-out characters and a "see it coming around the bend" twist at the end do not combine to enthrall.

Do buy "The John Varley Reader." Be amazed by brilliance. Pray that John Varley has only fallen asleep, and will someday awake, and return to writing the stories that have dazzled me for the last twenty-five years.

And do buy everything else by John Varley save "Mammoth/Red Thunder." Best money you ever spent.

I read this book--while attending to all the rest of a normal, busy weekend--in less than a day. That's "Harry Potter" speed--while there are plenty of "unputdownable" books that cross my desk in the course of a year, it's seldom that one puts all the right pieces together in all the right ways, and takes me back to the days before wife, family, etc., when there was nothing better or more pressing to do on a fine Saturday afternoon than sitting in my favorite chair with a good book.

The only reason that MAMMOTH has four stars rather than five is that there were a few hours there when I got to feeling that John Varley, one of the finest and most astute science fiction writers of his (my) generation, had decided to channel Michael Crichton; and much as I like Michael Crichton, dammit, Varley is so much better than that kind of novel that I was beginning to feel a little cheated. I should have known better. There are stretches where MAMMOTH fairly reeks of those plot twists, characters, and set-ups that would move without seam or hiccough from the page to the big screen-- but, but, I should have known better.

Anything I could possibly says about the plot of characters that Varley brings to life here would be unfair to anyone considering whether or not to read the book. I mean, the publisher has already told you that there's this 12,000-year-old frozen mammoth, and that there's a body--a human body--that they find with the mammoth . . . and the human is wearing a wristwatch. That's just too freakin' cool--and I'm not talking about the human. Or the wristwatch. Um, or the mammoth, either.

Ultimately, whether you like this book or not will depend--as it was with me--on what exactly you are hoping to get out of it. There's a lot being brought together in MAMMOTH, and some of it (see above) is not what I'd hoped for or expected. But in the end, what I got was a very good story, with characters that I liked and cared about, and a Saturday well-spent.

To be fair the only other thing I've read by the author was his short story Press Enter_ which I found in a Hugo Award compliation several years ago.

Since I loved Press Enter_ I had high expectations for Mammoth. Mammoth just didn't deliver. I think if the author had cut out a lot of the fluff this could have made a great short story. There was just too much fluff left in to make a great novel. Also, I think that if you're going to write a novel about time travel that you should make *some* attempt to explain where the time machine came from. Maybe you can get away with it in a short story but I expect more from a novel.

I did like the twist at the end though.

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)

It's bait and switch.

I thought this was going to be a Wellsian story - a time travel adventure featuring modern people trying to survive in a "cave man" era. That kind of story has been overdone, but from the starred buyer reviews I thought this would be better than reading Crichton.

Well, it's not. Varley is not a bad writer, but the story he offers here was a disappointment to me. It begins promisingly, but ends up taking place almost entirely in modern times.

In the end, it was the mild opening mystery that kept me reading, but not avidly at all and the eventual "revelation" wasn't much of a surprise.

I'd like to think that Varley wanted to do something different from yet another past-time adventure. What I suspect is that it's just much easier not to have to do all the research on Ice Age geobiology.

Varley resorts too often to deus ex machina to further his eventually predictable plot. Several key developments take place "off stage", then Varley has to spend time telling instead of showing. I don't like circuses and I thought that was wasted storyline. In my opinion, there was a lot of story padding like that.

Character motivation gets totally short-shrifted at the expense of implausible movie theater special effects and plot hastening.

Crichton aims his books at possible film sales too, but he is a better storyteller than Varley is here.

It's readable, but a major disappointment.

It's one of the tropes of time-travel novels: A guy finds a time machine in the present, then travels to the past and leaves it there so it will be found in the present, so he can travel to the past, etc. So, who invented the time machine? Is there even more than one in the universe? In this case, the finder is Howard Christian, eccentric multi-billionaire, sort of a cross between Howard Hughes and Bill Gates, and the time machine -- an array of colored marbles in an aluminum briefcase -- is discovered next to a frozen Pleistocene mammoth in northern Canada. To get the machine to work again, Howard hires Matthew Wright, genius mathematician and world expert on theoretical time travel. Matt, a true geek, nevertheless hits it off with Susan Morgan, elephant trainer and DVM, who's involved in another of Howard's projects, trying to recover viable mammoth sperm from the frozen specimen. And then things get crazy, the time machine activates itself (maybe), and suddenly Los Angeles is knee-deep in big, hairy pachyderms. Not much of this novel is really "science" fiction, being concerned more with the personalities of and interactions among the three main characters, the nature of large, intelligent mammals, and the more fanatical side of the "animal rights" movement, with a passing jab at government interrogation methods under the Patriot Act. I like Varley's work but he does much better when he sticks to his Heinleinian "Eight World" novels. This one is okay, but not at all up to his standards.

Although an enjoyable 'pot-boiler'-type adventure story, this novel is not really up to Varley's standards. The characters are too extraordinary: the world's richest man, the world's most beautiful actress, the world's best mathematician and a circus performer who also happens to be the leading expert on elephants. The concept of time travel is not fully worked out: the paradoxes are left unexplored, the mechanism is left unexplained, and the chunk of earth sent time-traveling changes size with each occurrence. The plot has some pleasant twists but also a fair amount of gaping holes (which I won't describe -- those who have already read it will know what they are).

In short, I enjoyed the journey but there were a few too many places along the trail where the reader's attention is drawn away from the story being told. Because this is John Varley, I expected a bit more.

Not really adult science fiction...Story line was good when the author stuck to it...too many lenghty pages on side issues to the characters...would have been better as a short story...