Mammoth opens with one of the best teases, well, ever. It's evocative, exciting, and incredibly promising. And maybe it's the way these things always go, but I found the unspooling of that tease incredibly unsatisfying. Varley is working here on solid, unimaginative genre ground; a mid-level Gregory Benford. The story isn't told terrifically, but there's enough mystery and verve to keep you plugging away for a hundred pages. Then there's a major scene, an early climax, and I found myself saying, "That's IT? Prehistoric creatures stampede in a major US city, and it's sorta boring?" And the rest of the book feels like...like he has to finish the book. He just feels tired. Two main characters come to love each other based on, well, their proximity to one another. No particular sparks here, just some regular dinners and a shared distaste for their mutual employer. So maybe it's like most relationships. At one point we're told that the lead male, Matt, would 'do anything for her', and we just shrug and say, sure, okay. I guess he will. There's a lot of filler, including an inexcusable 10 pages on the setup and layout of a prehistoric theme park. The final 50 pages begins with a major theft and escape, then fuzzily loses focus with long descriptions of search procedures undertaken by the villain. I was astonished. Perhaps Varley has never had a tight grip on pacing, but this is a bit of dialogue from page 302: "You got your B.C. ferries, and you got your Washington State ferries, One from Port Angles, on the peninsula, to Victoria, on Vancouver Island. From here at Anacortes to Sidney and Vancouver. Also from Bellingham to Vancouver, and from Everett to Victoria and Vancouver." Fun for Washingtonians, perhaps, but no one else. The overwhelming feeling is that Varley is tired. There's no real character development; the leads go through their paces, bouncing off each other in predictable ways. There's nothing to the science fiction, either; the final musings on the intersection of science and metaphysics is more like a late night conversation with a sweetheart (in fact, it takes place AS a late night conversation with a sweetheart) than a serious investigation of the meaning or implications of such an intersection. This section also closes with a handy bit of magic that is both unsatisfying and impossible to disguise as anything but a deus ex machina. Then there's some unpleasant chauvinism. A character is introduced in the latter half who we are repeatedly told is strong-minded and impossibly dedicated, but we never get a sense of any of these things; her main activity is to gently counsel her lover. Instead of being a strong character in her own right, she comes off as a convenient way for our main villain to get some final act sympathy and redemption. Yet another woman used to advance a man's story. And the coda is 15 pages of pastoral redemption, less concerned with character than a simple what-if. It's more appropriate for a short story, and maybe should have been one. Varley is more interested in the world brought to life by his fiction than in the motion of that fiction. The characters don't interest him particularly. He gets into some questions about animal welfare toward the end, but they feel like things that occured to him in the writing; they're certainly not guiding principles with which the fiction itself is concerned. He's much more interested in his theme park, in the strange childishness of his villain, in the ferry schedules in Northern Washington. In other words, he has fallen into the common trap of the SF writer, forgetting that his mythology and world-building don't supercede the people in that world, or what their struggles tell us about ourselves. It isn't easy getting old. In his early days, John Varley wrote some of the purest, most wonderful short SF stories imaginable. For him, SF wasn't about crazy aliens or amazing new technologies, it was about what it means to be human when certain restrictions were removed. Like that pesky requirement that we stick with our assigned gender. Or what it would be like to fall in love, but have every bit of the excitement and terror packaged up and sold for the entertainment of strangers. These stories were frightening in their honesty (read The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged) for the scariest apocalypse story of all time), and wonderfully simple and clear. His longer fiction has always been hit or miss. Millenium was a great idea that felt a little undercooked and overlong. The Golden Globe is a standard chase novel with somewhat interesting locales and a pat, Oedipal twist. The less said about the Titan novels the better. But Steel Beach is a masterpiece, wonderfully using the novel form to explore all aspects of its central question; when survival is a given, what do humans DO with themselves? It is tense and meandering and thoughtful and action packed, but throughout his imagination uses scenarios and characters as well-rendered fuel for the central question. In Mammoth, Varley's imagination lunges away from his characters, away from the core concepts, and attaches to irrelevant details. He should write a travel guide, set in his fictional near-future world. Then he can explore all these detours to his heart's content. As it is, Mammoth feels half-hearted, like an author at the end of a long writing career, doing what he knows how to do, but not enjoying it much any more. Well, enjoying certain parts, but not the parts that matter.
_Mammoth_ by John Varley was a thoroughly enjoyable science fiction novel, one of the best works of fiction I have read in some time. The basic premise of the story, easily gained by reading the back of the book, was that an eccentric multibillionaire, Howard Christian, sought to bring back the woolly mammoth via cloning and had funded expeditions to uncover frozen specimens with viable DNA, preferably from preserved reproductive organs. An excellent specimen is found in Canada, though researchers got more than they expected. Calling in Christian's right-hand man, Ralph Warburton, the researchers showed that the 12,000 year old carcass concealed a mummified human male. A spectacular and possibly lucrative find, Warburton's initial thoughts of National Geographic and Discovery Channel specials is put on hold when the researchers point out the most interesting thing of all; the man is wearing a very modern wristwatch, one that was entombed with the person all those millennia ago. Though excited by the recovery of good mammoth DNA, Christian becomes even more thrilled with the fact that he has in his possession undeniable proof of time travel. It isn't long before he hires experts to uncover the secrets of time travel (as well as return mammoths to the living); two of these experts are main characters in the book, Matt Wright, a physicist who was on a sabbatical of sorts, suffering from a nervous breakdown, when Christian's men virtually plucked him from his canoe while on a trout fishing expedition so that he could figure out how time travel can be achieved, and Susan Morgan, a person already in Christian's employ (as Christian owns the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus among many other things), noted as the world's foremost elephant trainer and handler, sought by Christian to help raise and train the mammoths he was beginning to create with his mammoth project.Not your typical time travel tale, it differed in several ways. First, relatively little time is spent back in the Pleistocene. Though we certainly get to see the time of the last ice age, most of the book takes place in the early years of the 21st century, exploring the lives of the characters and the ramifications of their discoveries. Could someone keep the existence of time travel secret? What would the mass media do? What would the government do? How have the _Jurassic Park_ books and movies shaped the public's and media's perception of extinct animals and their role, if they ever come to exist again, in today's world?Second, I found the way time travel was handled in the book very interesting, as Wright had to reverse engineer how time travel was accomplished. A researcher who knew that in realistic, human terms time travel was impossible, he had to unravel a mystery as to how this was accomplished and to try to replicate this amazing feat. Everything he knew said that this was impossible, but there it was, undeniable proof that it had happened. The book's presentation of the nature of time travel, the flow of time, and of paradoxes was intriguing.Third, the book was strongly character driven, with vivid and interesting characters, ranging from the shy, sometimes verbally challenged, on the edge of a breakdown yet very brave, even courageous (as well as brilliant) Wright to the fascinating character of Christian himself, a truly eccentric man with odd personal quirks, at times a monster, at other times a hero, but always interesting, reminding me at times of Howard Hughes.An enjoyable and fast read, I would rank it very highly among paleontology-themed science fiction novels and recommend it to anyone.
Do You like book Mammoth (2005)?
Interesting sci-fi yarn so far. Very fast read, amusing, but the characters are paper-thin. Sort of waiting for something to happen, as the climax seems a forgone conclusion, but that's what you get with a circular time travel narrative I suppose. Ok, so I finished. It ended pretty well, but that doesn't really excuse a lot of the tedium that it took to get there. The ending IS predictable, but the way Varley pulls it off is quite nice. Bumped it up a good half star in my estimation. Call it 2.75.
—j
I hadn't realized how much I have missed reading Varley until getting into this.The title, and the premise as described on the jacket, didn't do anything for me, but as I have always enjoyed a John Varley book I decided to read this as well, and am glad I did!Varley has a way of engaging the reader, bringing us into his story, rather than keeping us as observers.This is not Varley's best ... there are a number of "problems" I had with it, and it was moderately easy to predict the outcome, but a mediocre Varley is still better than most. Part of the problem was the dual focus that was distracting rather than intriquing. The idea of creating new mammoths from the DNA of a found mammoth implanted in modern elephants would be enough for a book, but then that's been done with Jurasic Park. The modern creation of the time machine would also be enough for a book, but has also been done in abundance. The idea of the protesters didn't really go anywhere even though there was a slight tie to them later.Still, despite the faults, this was a fun science fiction read.
—Daniel
He's an award-winning author (Nebula and Hugo) who I've never read before. I'd have to say this was fun and entertaining, not too deep but fast paced with interesting characters.There's Howard Christian, a multi-zillionaire who has financed the discovery of a fully intact frozen woolly mammoth. He is also a collector and since the discovery of the mammoth wants one for his circus. His idea is to clone the mammoth using elephant surrogate mothers.So he hires Susan Morgan, the best elephant trainer in the world, to care for any mammoths that result from his cloning experiment.Only there was something odd about the discovery -- underneath the mammoth is a frozen man wearing a 20th century wristwatch! And a metal briefcase containing a time machine. So next, Howard hires Matt Wright, a brilliant mathematical genius to fix the machine.And that's the basics of the story. It is told in parallel with a story about Fuzzy, a half woolly, half Columbian mammoth and his tribe.
—Mckinley
