Chronoliths ANNOTATION
This is no ordinary artifact. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiselled into it commemorates a military victory...sixteen years in the future.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past—and soon to be haunted by the future.
In early 21st-century Thailand, Scott is a slacker in a beach community of expatriates, barely supporting his wife and daughter. One day he witnesses an impossible event: the appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior.
This is no ordinary artifact. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiselled into it commemorates a military victory...sixteen years in the future.
Not long after, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok—obliterating the city and killing thousands.
Over the next several eyars, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, its own near future. Who is the warlord whose victories they note? Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange loop of causality keeps drawing him, to the central mystery and a strange final battle with the future.
SYNOPSIS
21st century Thailand, Scott is a slacker in a beach community of expatriates, barely supporting his family. One day he witnesses the appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior.
FROM THE CRITICS
VOYA
Scott Warden and his family are living a marginal existence in southern Thailand in 2021 when the first chronolith arrives with a rumble and a shock wave of bitter cold and radiation. It is a massive, three-hundred-foot-high blue pillar, celebrating a military victory that will take place twenty years in the future. Scott is among the first to arrive on the scene, linking him inexorably with subsequent chronoliths. Some arrive in uninhabited areas;others devastate cities. All are monuments to victories by a mysterious future leader called Kuin. Later, Scott, divorced and living in the United States, is offered a job by physicist Sue Chopra, whom he had met while a student at Cornell. Sue is working on the chronoliths and making even more progress than her government bosses realize. As new chronoliths appear ever closer to Europe and America, economies crumble and violent cults appear in the name of Kuin. Scott undertakes a desperate mission to Mexico to rescue his own daughter, who has been drawn into a Kuinist cult. Although by now scientists can predict the arrival of a chronolith, they are still powerless to destroy them. Sue believes that if a chronolith could be destroyed, the mythic power of Kuin would erode. Wilson writes intelligent, well-crafted, original science fiction that results in an excellent read. The hero is a flawed being who gradually redeems himself. The other characters are likeable, self-centered, or frightening, but always believable. The author's premises might be less so, but the plot moves along nicely to a surprising and satisfying conclusion. VOYA CODES:5Q 3P S A/YA (Hard to imagine it being any better written;Will appeal with pushing;Senior High, definedas grades 10 to 12;Adult and Young Adult). 2001, Tor, 256p, $22.95. Ages 15 to Adult. Reviewer:Rayna Patton—VOYA, December 2001 (Vol. 24, No. 5)
Kirkus Reviews
From the talented Wilson, another yarn whose central theme is a weird time travel variant (Darwinia, 1998, etc.). In 2021, programmer Scott Warden, now a beach bum in Thailand, his marriage disintegrating, goes with a friend, ex-marine Hitch Paley, to investigate an odd phenomenon in the jungle near Chumphon: the sudden, explosive appearance of a strange glasslike pillar, accompanied by downed trees, radiation, and freezing temperatures. The pillar bears an inscription recording a military victory by someone named Kuin-and it's dated 20 years in the future! Meanwhile, Scott's daughter Kaitlin falls deathly ill and his wife Janice whisks her back to the US. The pillar, or Chronolith, it emerges, is composed of exotic matter projected through time. Another soon another arrives in the middle of Bangkok, obliterating large parts of the city and killing thousands; others touch down all over southeast Asia, causing governments to collapse. Scott returns to Minneapolis, divorces, and finds work as a programmer; he runs into Sue Chopra, a genius physicist he knew at college, now studying the Chronoliths. She's convinced that the key involves temporal feedback in which the future creates the past, and that meetings and occurrences that appear coincidental aren't. Scott agrees to work for Sue; more and more Chronoliths arrive; crazy Kuin cults spring up everywhere. Is the future inevitable, or merely one possibility among many? Spellbinding and searing. After you finish, though, you realize that the time-hopping logic doesn't hold up.
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