April 2022: Millennium by John Varley

[SailorScoutMandy | 782]

Meet April's book: Millennium by John Varley

 

In the skies over Oakland, California, a DC-10 and a 747 are about to collide. But in the far distant future, a time travel team is preparing to snatch the passengers, leaving prefabricated smoking bodies behind for the rescue teams to find. And in Washington D.C., an air disaster investigator named Smith is about to get a phone call that will change his life...and end the world as we know it.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,547]

I'm already reading a ridiculous number of books, but this looks to be pretty short.  Trying to acquire it now.

[PII | 1,886]

Been looking for a good excuse to re-read this one.  

"I sent one of the team back to the future...."    p. 31

Use of this phrase predates the movie of the same title, though I wouldn't be surprised at all if it had been used earlier in some other author's work.

Also, in this book, this team member just happens to have been sent "back to the future" from the year 1955.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,547]

Alright, mine's arriving today, and I plan on jumping right in.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,547]

Finished it, and I liked it quite a bit.  Fast-paced, super easy to read, and relatively short.  Can't tell if anyone else is actually participating this month, but I recommend you do.

Thank you @PII.  I knew of the movie since Scream Factory released it years ago, but the book hadn't been on my radar.

[SailorScoutMandy | 782]

9 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Finished it, and I liked it quite a bit.  Fast-paced, super easy to read, and relatively short.  Can't tell if anyone else is actually participating this month, but I recommend you do.

Thank you @PII.  I knew of the movie since Scream Factory released it years ago, but the book hadn't been on my radar.

You read so fast you might get a speeding ticket haha

[Reed Rothchild | 9,547]

3 minutes ago, SailorScoutMandy said:

You read so fast you might get a speeding ticket haha

Even worse, I'm reading four other books at the same time (though 2 are audiobooks in my car).  The secret is to never have one second of downtime ever.

[Aguy | 773]

I'll be picking up my copy this weekend, I don't imagine it will take me long to get through.

[PII | 1,886]

On 4/12/2022 at 1:16 PM, Reed Rothchild said:

Finished it, and I liked it quite a bit.  Fast-paced, super easy to read, and relatively short.  Can't tell if anyone else is actually participating this month, but I recommend you do.

Thank you @PII.  I knew of the movie since Scream Factory released it years ago, but the book hadn't been on my radar.

My pleazsh.  I very much agree about the quick, easy pacing; it's one of the factors that makes this book so much fun to read, and a significant part of why I thought to recommend it.

Edited April 14, 2022 by PII

[PII | 1,886]

A Very Short List Of Salient Points And Random Quips I've Enjoyed Reading, Recording And Now, Sharing.

I don't think there's much at all here in the way of hard-spoilers but just in case-

Spoiler

“It’s a ritual; the death-dance of our times.  Television news is nothing without pictures, and it hardly matters what the pictures are so long as there’s something to back up the narration.”  p. 13

 

“Obviously, I had known what to expect, but some part of me is still surprised, still asks the stupid question.  I was out here to see a plane crash, but where was the plane?”

p. 15

 

“Trying to understand how somebody who could expect to live seventy years would take that sort of chance- with a body the contemporary medicine men could heal only imperfectly or not at all-how, in spite of that, they could take that first step out the door of the plane, helped me some in dealing with the trip through the Gate.  Not that I ever understood why those people jumped: 20ths don’t have the brains of a sow, that’s well known.  But even they didn’t actually enjoy it.  What they did was sublimate the universal fear of falling into another part of the brain: the part that laughs.  Laughter is an interrupted defense mechanism.  They’d interrupt their fear of falling so well they could pretend to themselves that jumping out of an airplane was fun.”  p.20

 

“The Trip through the Gate is different every time.  It is instantaneous, and it’s plenty of time to go insane.  It is a zone of simultaneity where I become, for a time too short to measure or remember and too long to endure, all things that have ever been.  I encounter myself in the Gate.  I create myself, then create the universe and emerge into my creation.  I fall downtime to the beginning of the universe and then bounce back to a time elsewhen.  That time turns out to be the dead past, come alive again re-animated for me…”  p. 21

 

“She got them moving, with a few more shouts and obscenities.  That’s one of the main things we study when we bone up on a culture: what words will shock the hell out of ‘em.  In the twentieth century, it was mostly intercourse and excrement.”  p. 24

 

“The other ability of the stunner that Lilly hinted at is to function rather like a cattle prod, but at a distance.  It hurts but does not incapacitate.  It works best when aimed at the soft, sensitive flesh between the legs-even better when delivered from behind.” p. 24

 

“They huffed and they puffed, but there’s hardly anything stronger than a 20th.  They abuse their bodies, drink , smoke too much, don’t exercise, let the flab build up, and they think they’re worn out after they’ve licked a postage stamp.  But they’ve got muscles like horses-and the brains to match.  It’s amazing the physical feats they can do if we push them hard enough.” p. 25

 

“As each walker carried his last body to the Gate he was shoved through himself.  p. 25

 

[There is absolutely nothing written on page 42, nothing strange or of any note whatsoever, so just don’t even go looking there]

 

“The thinning was going well.  We still had two hours to fly, and we’d taken forty or fifty out of the 747.  The plane had departed with almost every seat full.  One would think people would begin to notice empty seats, but the fact is it takes them a long time to realize what’s happening.  Part of that is because we pick the candidates for thinning very carefully.  We would not take a child without its mother, for instance.  Mommy would come looking.  But taking a mother and her crying infant is perfect.  The other passengers may notice on some level that the crying has stopped, but they never try to find out why.  That’s the sort of good fortune you just don’t question.

 

In the same way, we were alert for people most dissatisfied with the sardine-can seating arrangements, such as anybody sitting next to a tall person, or three unrelated men sitting in a row, especially if they were trying to work.  If that middle fellow got up to get a drink or visit the restroom he was unlikely to come back.  I’d never heard anybody complain about that, either.

 

But the biggest thing we had working in our favor was the unimaginable nature of what we were doing.  I’d see someone looking troubled, walking the aisles.  Maybe he’d noticed all the seats were filled when we took off, and now there were all these gaps.  What gives?  But logic is on our side.  The guy knows nobody has stepped outside for a smoke.  Thus, logic proves everyone is still aboard; ergo they must be in some other part of the plane.  Nobody ever gets farther than that, not even if we take half the passengers.” p.65

 

SUMMATION OF EXPLANATION FOR CRASH: {The computer switches the positions of the 35 and the 880 effectively manipulating the human component to direct the two planes to steer into each other while thinking that he is directing them to steer away from each other.} P. 83

 

“And that was how William Archibald “Bill” Smith entered my life.”  (Bill’s initials are W.A.S.) p. 86

 

“One: Things can be taken from the past as long as reasonable substitutes are left in their place.

Two: Events tend toward their predestined pattern.”  p. 90

 

“There are requirements other than sheer age, but I’ve never been able to figure them out.  Intelligence is a good one, and so is eccentricity.  If you’re a thirty-eight-year-old super-genius and a real pain in the ass, your chances of ending up on the Council are excellent.

 

They are an odd lot.  Most of them are not nearly as concerned with outward appearance as most gnomes.  Several have elected to house their brains in full prosthetic bodies, but more often than not they don’t look any more realistic than Sherman.  Ali Teheran is like Larry: a torso fastened to a pedestal.  Marybeth Brest is a talking head, a puss on a post, like from a cheap horror film.  Nancy Yokohama is a brain in a tank, and The Nameless One is just a speaker sitting on a desk.  Only the BC knows who, where, or what he is.

 

Who knows how important they are?  I doubt if even they could answer that.  But the fact is, I’d never heard of a case where the BC overruled one of the Council’s decisions.” p. 99

 

“Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.” p. 113

 

“Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart.  They’re just fast.  They can be programmed to act smart, but then it’s the programmer who’s actually smart and not the computer.  If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it.  And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart.” p. 121

 

“All time travelers are pessimists.” p. 131

 

“Many had decided to buy an insurance policy-which actually insured nothing, and was in fact a bet made with a large company concerning your survival.  To win the bet, you had to die.” p. 143

 

“…I looked back at her car.  I’m not even sure what it was, but it was Italian, looked like it had been built about twenty or thirty years from now, was about eighteen inches high and thirty feet long, and seemed to be doing sixty just sitting there.” p. 159

 

pp. 170-171 (here Louise thinks she is doing everything wrong in her pursuit of Bill while she is in fact doing everything right.)

 

“So I vacillated between feeling sorry for him and wanting to jerk him up by the collar and slap him around until he came to his senses.  I guess if I’d been born in the twentieth century, I’d have been a social worker.” p. 173

 

“Are you a mugger or a rapist?  I asked him.  Then I took his gun, threw him to the ground, and stood on his neck.” p. 174

 

“I was about to scratch on the door, remembered that was a different time and place, so I hit it with my fist instead.” p. 175

 

“I smoke after everything, Bill.  I smoke before everything.  If I could figure out a way to smoke while I was sleeping, I’d do it.  It’s only my inhuman self-restraint that leads me to smoke them one at a time in your presence.” p. 180

 

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re crazy.”

“I know that.  The Truth just isn’t good enough for some people.” p. 180

(this may be the greatest bit of dialogue ever conceived.)

 

“Henceforth, I shall regard you as The All-Seeing-Eye.” p. 201

 

“Last night you said you lost your job.”

“That’s right.”

“And you been drinking mighty heavy.  Is that why?”

“No, Gloria.  I’m drinking because I’m being chased by spooks from the fourth dimension.”

She laughed, and slapped her knee.

“That’ll do it,” she said.  p. 213

 

“The plagues were the really cute part.  Add laboratory-bred microbes to a high level of background radiation, and what you get is germs that mutate a hell of a lot faster than we can.  We’ve done our best, we’ve fought them with everything we have.  But your great-grandchildren came up with genetic warfare.  So now the plagues are locked up right in our genes.”  p.238

 

Edited April 14, 2022 by PII

[PII | 1,886]

I watched the movie again last night, right after I finished reading the book again.  I remember reading about the movie online at one time and saw it getting a lot of hate that I think is both understandable to a degree, but also blown way out of proportion.  There is a lot to like about it in spite of the fact that 1.) A lot was changed, sometimes even by necessity, 2.) A lot was left out, which I almost always detest in book to movie conversions, by which I simply mean to point out that this is typical.  And 3.) The film certainly contains a few distinct flaws.  For example: there are thankfully brief points at which the soundtrack is totally out of character for a sci-fi film of this wonderfully bleak tone.  Anyway, a good reboot/remake of this would be dope and in the meantime, I'd recommend it to anyone who has read the book. 

One of the best parts is how much it clearly influenced 12 Monkeys which is another long time favorite.

Edited April 14, 2022 by PII

[Link | 2,714]

I knew the author sounded familiar. I read The Ophiuchi Hotline a while ago. Well, copy acquired and taxes done. Here we go.

[Aguy | 773]

I finished this morning and I really enjoyed it and @Reed Rothchild is spot on. I can also appreciate how it combines a very simple premise (the search for an object) with a very complex mechanic (time travel). It doesn't get bogged down in the delivery, despite it getting a little timey-wimey toward the end.