Timeline Analysis

Timeline by Michael Crichton is a book about a group of college students who time travel to Europe in the Late Middle Ages to rescue their professor, who is stuck there.

The technology that allows them to do this is invented by a company called ITC, which chooses not to reveal the technology to the public (until the very end of the book).

ITC plans to profit from their technology by rebuilding tourist sites across the globe exactly as they were in history, as they can go back in time to get a perfectly accurate rendition. Then, they buy up the area around the sites and make money from hotels, restaurants, and more. The CEO of ITC claims that entertainment is the driver for today’s society and that boredom has become our biggest fear. He says that current forms of entertainment lack authenticity, which is why people will seek it in one of the only places it still exists: the past.

There is truth to these claims. In today’s society, people are spending more and more time watching TV, playing video games, and doing other things of the sort. These experiences are carefully crafted by corporations who wish to profit off of them, so they are not authentic. In fact, they aren’t even real, but we wish they were. That’s why we try to make video games and movies as realistic as possible, constantly improving graphics and video quality. We want these experiences to feel as real as possible.

The book makes a good point that we need to remember that unstructured forms of entertainment exist. There are authentic ways to have fun that aren’t entirely manmade. If we forget that these exist, corporations–and/or the government–will be able to control our lives to a greater degree because we will rely entirely on them for our entertainment, the most important thing in our lives today.

Finally, the CEO of ITC is a money-hungry, power-hungry, selfish man who doesn’t care about putting others at risk of death in order to test his technology and ensure that it doesn’t get leaked to the public. Near the end of the book, he decides that ITC should not let the students return to the present because there is a chance they will come back with transcription errors (slight physical deformities resulting from time travel). This would almost ensure that they would die in the past, but he would rather that happen than have them come back to the present with transcription errors, as that could turn into a publicity nightmare if the public found out about the errors.

This is the manifestation of a common theme, which is that power and greed are dangerous, and that no individual should be allowed to have so much power that it corrupts them. This is important in today’s society not only when we look at government officials but also when we look at corporate executives.