In some ways, Michael Crichton (MC) feels to me like the new Stephen King (SK). MC and SK have very different writing styles, and Crichton isn't half as interested in horror novels, but both authors have been adapted to cinema, with huge commercial success, and those adaptations have started new trends.

Crichton's trend is "new tech drama". Just remember Jurassic Park, Congo, Andromeda Strain, and Sphere, and that should be more than enough for you to understand MC's message: high technology can be misused. The fears some people feel precisely about such misusage, certainly have a commercial potential...

Jurassic Park's technology was the genetic engineering of dinosaurs, starting from DNA held on amber; Sphere's technology was an alien device found under sea, and the means to dive deep enough to study it; finally, Timeline's technology is Quantum Theory (QT) - something that I can't understand, and certainly Crichton can't too, despite his efforts to present the reader with an outline of strange events that might happen, under QT's perspective.

Nils Bohr is quoted on the book, having said "anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it". I certainly don't understand it, but I read a few articles on a narrower version of it - Quantum Computer Science (QCS) - and it is all very much related to Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle", holding that it is impossible to determine both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. What's the use?!

Well, due to such uncertainty, one can - in theory - assume that at any given instant, a particle holds any charge (value) we might think of, meaning that if information could be expressed as q-bits (not regular bits), a n-sized word could hold *ALL* the 2^n possible combinations of data, instead of *ONE* single effective combination from the 2^n chances. In plain maths, a regular byte (1 byte = 8 bits) can be one of 2^8=256 values, but a quantum-byte (q-byte) can be all the 256 values at *the same time*. The impact is mainly on nano-techology...

But lets be blunt: Timeline is a work of fiction. Lets not try to go over that and pretend to know about subjects who are truly known, to only a few thousands people on the entire planet.

So, back to fiction, Timeline is all about a very wealthy american corporation, lead by a money blind genius, founding archeological research on Europe/France... the hidden purposes of the corporation is to bring parallel universes traveling a reality! Time traveling...

Timeline is quite an enjoyable reading, that drives your own imagination wild! Characters are only deep enough for being credible and coherent, but not one will deviate the reader from the flow of events, meaning that the many personages are, just like in everyday life, just "going with river", even when they think they have the slightest control.

A modern fantasy! Enjoy.