Book Review: The Chronoliths

Robert Charles Wilson

2001
Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Wilson really knows how to come up with a premise that immediately hooks you, and then how to reel out that premise over the course of a fast-paced, page-turning novel. The Chronoliths, is a solid case in point; it was almost as much fun as his later novel Spin.

Like Spin, The Chronoliths is set in the near future and stars ordinary people thrust into extraordinary times by threatening and mysterious futuristic technology.

When the book opens, the main character, our hero Scott Warden, is happily wasting his life away as an American ex-pat in Thailand, spending most of his time with his disreputable, drug-dealing best friend Hitch, and royally screwing up his relationship with his wife and small daughter, when he witnesses the sudden appearance, out of nowhere, of an enormous glassy blue obelisk smack in the middle of Bangkok. It has flattened most of downtown.

The writing on the obelisk explains that it is a monument commemorating the military victory of some leader named “Kuin” over Thailand—and it is dated more than twenty years in the future.

Scott and Hitch, naturally, decide they have to go investigate the monument and, naturally, they get detained almost immediately by military patrols. This means that Scott is not home when his daughter loses part of her hearing from a severe ear infection, prompting his wife to declare that she’s had enough of this lifestyle, and flies herself and their daughter back to the States.

                                                                                                      

Over the next few years, these blue monuments, dubbed “chronoliths” by the press, appear all over southeast Asia, and then start spreading elsewhere—Beijing, the Middle East, Cairo.

After the arrival of a couple chronoliths, an old physics professor of Scott’s, Sue Chopra, pulls him in to work for her. She is heading a government project to unravel the mystery of the chronoliths. She wants Scott involved because he was there at the appearance of the first one, and that makes her think his fate is somehow intertwined with theirs.

The chronoliths and the mysterious, seemingly unstoppable Kuin inspire panic, throwing the world into an economic tailspin. Poverty spikes, employment grinds to a halt, skirmishes break out everywhere. It is as if Kuin, by declaring his victories twenty years in advance, is causing countries to destroy themselves in fear and chaos before he even raises an army.

Which is exactly what Sue Chopra says is the point. The chronoliths themselves create a self-reinforcing feedback loop; by appearing, they destabilize countries and scare or impress people into following Kuin or acceding to him, thus earning him a victory before he has to fire a shot. If Sue can figure out how to disrupt the onward march of the chronoliths, she thinks that will reverse the feedback loop and prevent Kuin from coming to power in the first place.

The rest of the book is a relatively fast-paced race against time, in which Sue and Scott and their team have to figure out how the chronoliths got here and how to stop them before the twenty years are up and Kuin finally really arrives on the scene in person. Scott’s whole family ends up embroiled in it, with his daughter and his ex-wife’s new husband both getting caught up with dangerously fanatical groups of Kuin devotees.

                                   

The Chronoliths poses the usual deep-think time-travel questions, such as: What if the future is predetermined and no matter what I do now, it will inevitably contribute to bringing the chronoliths? And: What if I do prevent the chronoliths from coming and it causes some kind of paradox or parallel universe in which the things I know will no longer exist? But don’t expect anything super profound from it; it is primarily a fun, easy read.

Scott Warden kind of reminds me of the main present-day character from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Scott is a bearded hippiesh throwback and something of a ne’er-do-well, with penchants both for southeast Asian countries with beaches and for messing up his personal life. He’s not really all that appealing and not very sympathetic, except that he’s smart. But that doesn’t really matter; the ideas carry the book along in spite of Scott’s down sides.

I think Wilson could easily write a blockbuster multi-million-selling novel if he wanted to. He knows how to set up an engaging premise and then reveal its facets at a comfortable pace. I think maybe the reason they aren’t blockbusters is probably that they’re a little too subtle, and maybe a little too nerdy. Which, of course, is what makes his books better than your average blockbuster.