Mammoth

Brief note: Somehow I’ve lost over half my general subscribers, and all of my Lost subscribers. What happened? What’d I do?? Unless feedburner is broken and given me inaccurate results, tell me so I can make it all better.

In my effort to keep up with my New Year Goal of reading 25 books this year, I can finally make another hash mark next to the massive one I already have from Steven King’s “Bag of Bones.” Next up was a surprise to me, because I just picked it up and started reading the first few sentances, and before I knew it a week had passed and it was done.

A week! I’ve never finished a novel in just one week! Some people can finish one in a few days, but for me it’s always at least two or three weeks.

Anyway, the name of the book was “Mammoth,” and it’s written by John Varley. And like I say when I finish any book I read, it was the best book I’ve ever read. I read another book of his last September called “Millennium,” about a group of people from the future who travel back in time before major catastrophic events and steal the human bodies before they all die, in hopes of repopulating their own world in the future where everybody is sterile. His ideas and writing style are similar to mine (or, at least, how I wish mine to be), so I picked up another one of his that sounded like it might be good, and that was “Mammoth,” and like I said, it was good.

It centers around two main characters, Susan, a circus performer and elephant trainer, and Matt, a brilliant but socially awkward physicist. They were both hired by billionaire Howard Christian for their unique talents… see, Howard, using all that money, has unearthed the greatest scientific discovery of our time: a frozen, in tact, woolly mammoth, complete with a frozen, in tact caveman. His goal is to clone the woolly mammoth and use it to make even more money. So he hires people to clone it, and Susan to oversee that project. But there’s the first twist: the caveman is wearing a wrist watch.

Wait a tick! Cavemen didn’t wear wristwatches! It’s either a hoax, or…

…time travel, friends, so Howard hires Matt to rebuild what can only be a time machine, which is in the form of a briefcase next to the caveman.

Well, Matt is (semi)-successful, and rebuilds something, which ends up throwing Susan and Matt 12,000 years into the past. They spend some time there before Matt can figure out how the time machine works, and when he does, they’re avoiding a group of mammoths… but when they blink back into the future, the mammoths have come with them.

So, now, Howard not only has a time machine but 6 or 7 mammoths. Well, you can imagine what would happen of 7 mammoths were let loose in downtown LA. One survives, Howard keeps it, trains it, etc., and it turns into a King Kong story. The whole caveman-wristwatch thing takes a backseat to that story, which is surprisingly entertaining, if not a bit padded and long. The whole story could have been about 100 pages shorter and not lost a thing, but any interaction between Susan and Matt (especially when Matt dorks out and gets all technical on her) is great.

I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say the caveman is not a caveman at all, and may or may not be someone we all know. But I will say that the book dealt heavily with what I like to look at as the cyclical nature of time, how time may not be linear at all, free will, pre-determination (or pre-destination?), all things that time travel conjures up.

If that’s not your thing, at least you have some pretty touching scenes between a woman and her pet mammoth.

Anyway, I’d recommend it.