Mammoth

This item was exactly as advertised. It arrived in very good condition and timely.

I love John Varley's work for exactly the same reason that some of the other reviewers hate it. Varley never lets the need to sanctify the 'science' with some pretentiously clever BS that too often appears in hard-SciFi to mask the writer's lack of interest in people. Varley likes people. It is the difference in Clarke and Heinlein. Do you remember any of Clarke's people? Do you remember any of Heinlein's science? If you like people oriented SciFi, you will like Varley. Some of his work has been wish fulfillement for me. To heck with the science, I want to join those folks on the adventure.

_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 prese

Of all the science fiction concepts, time travel is one of the hardest to execute properly. There are always so many opportunities for logical problems that almost no story gets by unscathed. With Mammoth, John Varley returns to the topic (also discussed in the far different Millennium) and - while still unable to avoid the seemingly inherent flaws in the subgenre - he does create a light, well-written novel. The novel begins with a mammoth being found in the Arctic wastes of northern Canada. It is well-preserved in ice, just the way multi-billionaire Howard Christian wants it; it is his hope to clone it using some of its intact DNA. But mammoth-cloning takes a back seat to a different discovery: also frozen with the mammoth is a man wearing a wristwatch along with a strange device. The man is obviously a time-traveler, but is the device a time machine? To get the answers, Christian recruits Matt Wright, a mathematical super-genius to figure out the device. Meanwhile, Susan Morgan is hired to tend to the elephant that will carry the clone; she and Matt will soon fall for each other. Matt has very limited success figuring out the machine, but an accident will get it working, throwing both Matt and Susan into the distant past. This will be a brief excursion, but when they return, they bring a few mammoths with them. This is initially a disaster, but Christian is able to make it into an opportunity. As with many time-travel stories, this one has its logical inconsistencies or paradoxes, a point that even Varley is aware of. He doesn't try to explain these problems away but rather incorporates them into his tale. The story itself has its moments of predictability, but any flaws are far outweighed by the Varley's fine writing; Varley has had a nearly unbroken string of well-written novels, and this fits right in. If you enjoyed Jurassic Park, you'll find that this one is even better.

Not your typical John Varley sci fi thriller, this story is nonetheless a great read. The premise, mammoths in the 21st century, and how this transpired will keep the reader interested right up until the somewhat surprising ending. A must for John Varley fans.