Customer Reviews

Millennium

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's not normal practice for me to watch a film prior to reading the book it's based on, but when I do, watching the film can lead me to some very good books. Such was the case with Millennium by John Varley. I had seen the film with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd a number of times but had been frustrated in my efforts to obtain a copy of "Air Raid", the original short story the film was credited as being based on, until one day when the book almost literally fell into my lap.

I gotta tell you, Millennium was one of those books I could not put down. From the first page, I found myself absolutely enraptured by the characters of both Louise Baltimore and Bill Smith. Varley's Smith is actually very close to the character that Kris Kristofferson portrayed in the movie, but his Louise Baltimore is a very tough, take-charge kind of gal that's unlike the one played by Cheryl Ladd in the film. That Louise always seemed to be looking to her personal robot, Sherman, for advice, whereas the Louise of Varley's book might have depended on Sherman for emotional support at times, but generally kept her own counsel and scoffed at the very notion that Sherman's ideas could be taken seriously in a critical mission such as the one she was running to Smith's time in order to get her lost "stunner". The funny thing was, in the end it was the Big Computer who was running everything, and not Louise or Bill or even Sherman.

I am currently on my 6th copy of this excellent time-travel novel (the other 5 have worn out due to repeated readings), and I hope that all of you who are sci-fi enthusiasts will take the time to pick up a copy and read it, if you haven't read it already. It's a definite page-turner.

I disagree with the other writers. I have read a lot of Varley and think this is just about his best. The Titan series was very enjoyable but also very adolescent (nothing against teen agers, mind you, I find the T & A in Titan tiresome). Anyway, Millenium is an interesting, well thought out, time travel book, with some very original premises. It seems sort of goofy at first, but ties together very well by the end. The characters are real people (even sherman, the robot!), and they act in beleivable ways. The plot is well thought out, moves along at a good clip, doesn't get too bogged down in the complexities of time travel, and has a reasonably fulfilling ending. What more could you want? Ophiuchi Hotline was my 2nd favorite of Varley's. Steel Beach was a real disappointment.

Millennium is one of my "keepers" and the one I lend out to get my friends hooked on science fiction. This is the kind of book tou take to the beach in the morning and end up going home only because it's getting too dark to read. The two person; 1st person viewpoints (burnedout, middle-aged NTSB crash investigator/Type A-personnality girl from the umpteen century)is a neat way to tell a story and makes this a fast and enjoyable read.

Not to complain, but I found that all the stuff Varley wrote before I discovered him (in Titan) is ever so much better than the stuff SINCE I discovered him. This book is dynamite and a great read. It was a fair movie (with some laughable sfx) but the book delivers.

John, if you're out there...go back to Gaea. Get back on the airplane. Go to Jupiter and kick those mysterious thingies butts! Quit messing with reporters and faux-shakesperean actors.

I don't much like reading books about time travel. Mostly it just makes me dizzy, I don't deal well with paradoxes. There are a few exceptions, like Lest Darkness Fall (Pyramid SF, F-817) and Time and Again. Millennium is another that has taken up permanent occupancy on my bookshelves, and I've been puzzling over why.

I think it's because the premise for time travel in this novel is practical. The novel's present is robbing/mining/harvesting/exploiting the past to save the future, to ensure the survival of humankind. It wasn't a bolt of lightning (Lest Darkness Fall), it wasn't a self-induced hypnotic state (Time and Again), no, this time the narrative creates a time travel machine specifically for this task and none other.

The motivation is great on a character level, too. Louise and the rest of her Snatch Team are sacrificing their own lives for the sake of the rest of the human race, and FAA investigator Bill Smith's job and personal curiosity, as well as his love for Louise, pushes him inevitably toward solving this mystery.

One of the best robot characters ever created in SF, too, and a Chapter 2 shout-out to Robert A. Heinlein. Nothing not to love here.

In fact, time to reread it again...

Millennium, isn't bad, either.

Varley is also the author of what I think is one of the best sf short stories ever, "In the Hall of the Martian Kings," collected in Persistance of Vision.

I became a hard-core sci-fi fan in the 1950s. Since then, my reading has become more discriminating. This book meets my much higher standards for a good read for several reasons. First, I liked the character of Louise Baltimore. Second, I liked Varley's telling of this tale through alternating points-of-view in alternating chapters. I liked the plot, and finally I liked the last chapter, where a final character emerges to tie it all together by revealing the things not seen in the characters povs.

If you like movies that involve time travel (and who doesn't?) this is the book for you. I like to look for flaws in most time travel books/movies. There are usually many. Varley has written an engaging science fiction book that seems to be written with consideration taken for the critical eye of people like me. Layered over a plot that has you at the edge of your seat, Varley addresses technical aspects and consequences of time travel. I remember the old Chiffon Margarine TV commercial from the 70's ... "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature." Well, Varley teaches us a lesson similar to that in this book. It's not nice to fool Father Time.

I don't know why I was suprised to see this book on the shelves. A lot of great books are banged out into horrid movies, so it never occured to me to take a look at the source material for the lousy film of the same name. The characters in this story are so real that they suck you in with their narratives, making it impossible to put the book down, because you have to find out what happens. Louise and Bill make yet another time travel story sing with the kinds of details about their situations that take this from just one more story to place of its own. This is a great tale of what it takes to survive the end of mankind.

This is an 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, starring Rod Taylor ). This novel does have a unusual plot- people in the future going into the past via a gate and exchanging doomed crash victims with replacements called wimps. Since Earth of the future was a dying planet due to thousands of years of wars and pollution, they built a spaceship that was to carry the healthy humans from the past to another planet or to a future Earth millions of years from now. The people of the future couldn't go because they didn't live long due to the poisoned air they evolved to breath. So Earth's future was really in the past.

The biggest problem 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, then you wouldn't have been born and therefore unable to kill your father. Changing anything in the past can 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 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 guns were lost on two separate plane crashes, during the removal of crash victims before the accident occurred. The guns are used to stun the passengers so they can be transferred through the gate and into a holding pen, while the wimps take their place on the plane.

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 discovered that the crash victims all ate chicken during the flight- so what? And when Smith discovered 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, never to come up again. Other than that, the book was well written and thought out. I especially like the way most chapters were titled... 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 science theories comprehensible.

FYI, for those trying to locate the short story "Air Raid" which Varley's novel and the movie were expanded upon and based on was written under the name Herb Boehm and originally was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Spring 1977. It came in 2nd place in both the 1977 Nebula and 1978 Hugo awards for best short story.