Timeline

Timeline is another "techno-thriller" by American author Michael Crichton, following Jurassic Park. Published in 1999, the story opens in the Dordogne Valley of southwestern France, where an archaeological team is excavating two medieval castle sites—one held by the English, one by the French—dating to the Hundred Years' War. Yet a series of strange events ensues: inside a site sealed for centuries, team members find notes in the hand of their supervising professor, who has himself vanished. As the group struggles to make sense of it, the project's sponsor—an international corporation with cutting-edge technology—calls to reveal the truth: they have made a major breakthrough in quantum physics and built a device that can send people into the past. The professor has used it to return to the Middle Ages and conduct fieldwork at the very site the team is excavating, only to be trapped in fourteenth-century France with no way back. A small rescue team of young historians is therefore sent into an era they had studied only in documents and ruins. Medieval Europe proves far more dangerous than any textbook: muddy roads, forbidding castles, lords and knights ruling their own domains, and wartime filled with lethal threats. The group must rely on their historical knowledge to read the situation and tell friend from foe, surviving amid the clash of English and French armies while finding the professor and attempting to return to the present within the device's time limit. The novel blends quantum technology, historical research, and action-adventure into a tightly paced story that also restages, through first-hand experience, the harshness and brutality of medieval life.