Book Review: Millennium

John Varley
1983
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I made the mistake of starting to read this book while on a plane. This was a very bad idea. The plot revolves around a mid-air plane collision between a DC-10 and a Boeing 747 in the skies over Oakland, California. And the first two-thirds or so of the book describe various aspects of the crash in excruciating detail, from the charred, severed limbs of the victims to the play-by-play of both cockpit voice recorders as the crew realized the trouble they were in. I had to put the book down several times mid-flight before eventually giving up and finishing it after I’d gotten safely back on the ground.

Once I did, I found that Millennium is a compact, well-plotted, well-paced time-travel novel with big, prescient warnings for those of us living in the here and now. It predicts a horrifying potential future that is the natural result of our disdain for our planet, and the least advantaged people who live on it. And it does it in a hard-boiled way that doesn't come off the least bit preachy.

The book is told in the form of intertwining testimonies from its two major characters. One testimony is that of Bill Smith, the National Transportation Safety Board Investigator in Charge who had the bad luck to be on call when the plane collision happened. He is a struggling alcoholic with the usual associated family troubles. But he's also doggedly determined to unravel all the threads of the crash mystery until he figures out what happened, and why.

The other testimony is that of Louise Baltimore, the leader of a time-traveling clean-up crew from forty thousand years in the future. Her job is to do “snatches,” during which they use a time portal to board airplanes before they crash, pull off all the still-living passengers through the portal into the future and replace them with staged, faked dead bodies—why, we don't know yet—and then go back and fix anything that went wrong during the snatch that could alter the timeline between ours and hers.

Louise and her staff are on board both of the planes, attempting to remove all the passengers before they collide, when they run into unexpected trouble: a hijacker shoots one of the Louise's crew members, and, in the subsequent confusion, one of them loses her stunner on the plane.

During his investigation, Bill starts to piece together things that make him realize that this crash is an odd one. On the bodies he has recovered, for example, all the watches are set exactly 45 minutes ahead. And on the black box recording, one of the crew is heard yelling about how everyone on the plane is burned and dead—before the crash happens. And then Bill sifts through every piece of debris and finds the stunner. Which means Louise has to go back and find Bill before he finds the stunner, and retrieve the gun from the debris before it screws up the timeline.

Inevitably, Bill and Louise meet and develop a sympathy and attachment to each other that prevent them from doing their jobs as dispassionately as they should, and the timeline starts to get more and more screwed up, and Louise's present starts to unravel.

In the process, we learn just how painful Louise's present is. The earth is next to unlivable, ecologically. And everyone suffers from all sorts of defects and degenerative organ diseases, so that the lucky ones don't die until their late twenties, having had most of their organs and limbs replaced and their bodies covered with artificial skin suits. And we learn that the stolen passengers from the crashes are part of the future's desperate, last-ditch attempt to save humanity.

The time travel in Millennium has plausible governing principles surrounding paradoxes: big events matter to the timeline, but little details generally don't, which allows Louise's clean-up crew some much-needed wiggle room. The settings, especially the future forty thousand years from now, have a bare-bones, Dashiell-Hammett-type grittiness. And so do the characters; Bill and Louise are both reluctant to get emotionally involved with anyone. If anyone in this pair is the sensitive one, it is Bill; Louise, raised in a nearly hopeless world, is a tough, hard-boiled cynic. But both of them have hearts of gold buried under their alcoholic and/or sarcastic exteriors, and they somehow are able to see that in each other and to join forces to try to save a future neither one will ever see. The result is an unexpectedly moving story.