I have always been fascinated by the theory of time travel and have spent massive amounts of time reading as many of these types of books that I could find. Of all the books in the genre, there are only 2 that seem to stand out for different reasons for me. Written in 1992 and 1997 respectively, Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book and Michael Crichton both deal with the premise of historians travelling to the past but for highly different reasons.
For Connie Willis, the characters needed to travel back in time for a historical study gone almost hopelessly awry. In the present of the novel, the remaining characters work tirelessly to get their stranded comrade back from an era where she was not supposed to be in the first place. While Michael Crichton sent his characters back in time in order to save a noted historian whose time travel times also took a serious turn for the worst. Those who were left in the present era to assist them in coming back though have their own agenda and work towards an endgame, that of covering up the mistakes of their experiment in time travel.
Through this comparison paper, I hope to prove that, even though authors shall never admit it, they are also heavily influenced by the written works of their predecessors and oftenimes, end up borrowing story plots and devices which the latter writer, who in this case is Michael Crichton, hoped to have improved upon in his version of a suspense thriller time travel tale.
Setting wise, the books both chose notable events within our world history within which to set up the story backdrop. Willis chose the British Black Plague pandemic of 1348 as the main setting of the story while intermitently returning to the futuristic world of England in 2055. On the other hand, Crichton chose to revisit medival France during the wartime era of 1357 while also making refence to the Black Death pandemic towards the end of his book.
Having read the Doomsday book prior to Timeline, I immediately noticed the influence of Connie Willis’ writing upon reading the first chapter of Timeline. The most notable influence of Connie Willis upon his work is clearly seen in the way the theory of the Multiuniverse is supported by both writers. While both writers support the theory via the existence of time portals within the past and the present, their ideas as to how one can gain access to such portals is where the difference in their multiuniverse beliefs seperate.
The respected lady author believes that time portals are rips in time that open up on a rotating schedule within which the traveller can come and go from his present position, which I shall call Point A, to the exact same position in the past and vice versa. On the other hand, the esteemed doctor author espoused that the time travel theory works in a similar fashion as fax machine. Meaning that man goes back in time by sending a copy of himself into the past which then becomes a reality due to the reassembly of the person’s body in the past.
Healthwise, the authors both acknowledge that, should the time travel capability actually exist, the time traveller shall have physical and and mental repercussions to consider. On the part of Ms. Willis, she calls the illness time lag. A situation that causes the traveller to be careless, thus causing the time travel errors that exist in her book. While Mr. Crichton believes that, because of the need to disassemble and then reassamble a persons DNA during the procedure, the traveller could be prone to madness and rapid aging due to the stress caused by the procedure.
With regards to character development, I have to say that Connie Willis had a more coherent way of presenting and developing her main characters in relation to how they affect the events that unfold within the story. She accomplished this task by limiting the number of characters and events within the story. Such centered character development allowed her to effectively use the character situation in moving along her story without being bogged down by too many subplots.
In contrast the the Nebula Best Novel awardee story, Mr. Crichton’s character development and story telling is bogged down by numerous subplots and supporting characters who each had their own back story which, in my honest opinion, muddled the character and plot development of the novel.
Due to the research intensive basis of both novels, I could not help but also compare the way that the authors presented the results of their research into the story. Was it smooth and flawless? Or an obvious cut and paste job? Honeslty speaking, I think that, because Connie Willis has the female writer’s point of view, she managed to present her time travel explanations in a detailed way without sounding like she was simply paraphrasing her research material.
Crichton on the other hand, seemed to not have enough time, or perhaps have no patience to rework his research so that his explanations sounded almost as it these were taken word for word from his research sources. In fact, there were times when I found myself thinking that he had actually just done a cut and paste job for most of the information within the paper. It lacked the literally artistry that I have come to expect from his previously written work.
Finally, I come to what I believe is the most important comparison point of these 2 novels, the writing styles of the two authors. I would like to begin this comparison with my observations of Michael Crichton’s writing style for this particular novel. We all recognize that Michael Crichton was one of the most prolific, writers of his era. His writing is mostly well researched and concise in terms of story telling. However, later on in his career, he began to write stories, not for the enjoyment of his readers, but for the benefit of the big Hollywood studios with whom he had, by then, struck lucrative story development and production deals.
One of the first stories that he developed specifically for the screen was Timeline. The story is basically written and reads like an extended screenplay complete with scene direction and set blocking. His attention in writing this story was more on the set up than the plot and character devices necessary to move the story along. There were certain points while reading his novel when I found myself losing interest of having my thoughts wander away from the written page as the story got more confusing and convoluted by the page.
On the other hand, Connie Willis uses her over active imagination to entice her readers to join her on a wonderful journey of historical learning and future predicting. Her smooth writing style and evenly developed characters and plots make for interesting reading and, left me burning the midnight candle as I tried to finish her novel at the soonest possible time. Her novels, if turned into Hollywood movies shall be, if I may be allowed to hazard a prediction, shall benefit highly from the cutting edge development of computer CGI’s.
It is interesting to note that these two novels were written only few years apart. This makes me wonder as to how much influence Ms. Willis’ Doomsday Book actually had on the story development of Mr. Crichton’s Timeline novel. Perhaps the similarities in the story and explanations are only a coincidence, maybe not. In the end though, both novels are worthy of being read more than once if only for the high adrenalin adventure that the authors both successfully conveyed in both their novels.