Shortly after starting this story there’s a scene where Louise Baltimore, one of two main characters, has sex with a robot. I was put off last year when reading Picnic on Nearside by John Varley’s over-emphasis on weird sex. I groaned. Suddenly Millennium was looking like more of the same. Thankfully it turned out otherwise.
The premise is that humans from the future have a time travel device that allows them to travel to the past. Most time travel stories are an elaborate attempt to work through the paradox issue. Don’t go back and kill your grandfather cause then you’ll never be born and you can’t go back to kill him so you will be born after all and then … Millennium has some of that and the book is weakest when it tries to explain. The short version though is that, like in a couple other time travel stories, so long as no one notices there is no paradox. Don’t take anything that will be missed, don’t leave anything that will be seen as out of place.
So for reasons unexplained people in the future have been snatching people who are about to die. For instance, from airplanes that are about to crash. The aforementioned Louise Baltimore is a snatch team leader. They go back, snatch people, and then replace them with specially grown near-human bodies from the future so that no one will notice. After the plane crashes that is.
Only one day something goes wrong. On two separate trips Louise’s team loses futuristic weapons that stun. So she has to go back in time several more times in attempts to correct the mistakes. But each attempt seems to make things worse.
The other main character is Bill Smith, the lead investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. He’s the one who discovers one of the stunners.
The book’s ending is quite satisfying. A lot of time travel stories end with a whimper and not a bang. This one is pretty good.
Orson Card wrote once about the movie Memento that it was just a gimmick and hard to watch a second time because without the gimmick ordering it was a pretty boring story. There’s a little bit of that going on in Millennium. The story ordering follows Louise as she jumps through time. Since each jump doesn’t put her progressively forward, we get to learn things before Smith does, as his story moves forward linearly. It’s a little gimmicky but it works.
Title: Millennium
Author: John Varley
Imprint / publisher: Berkley Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 247 p.
Publication date: May 1985 (originally June 1983)
ISBN-10: 0-425-07674-1
LC classification: PS3572.A724 M5 1983
