Timeline

by Michael Crichton

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it.”

“Nobody understands quantum theory.”

there is a sentiment here that Americans destroy all culture, having none of their own.

“Disease. That blight, phylloxera, killed all the vines around the turn of the century. And the forest grew back.” And he added, “The French wine industry almost vanished. They were saved by importing vines that were phylloxera-resistant, from California. Something they’d rather forget.”

The computer made a soft beep. The image switched abruptly. “Oops. We’re in e-mail.” Chris clicked on the mailbox. There was just one message, and it took a long time to download.

Highlighted this because the book is peppered with great descriptions of old technologies

She brushed strands of blond hair back from her face. Kate Erickson was not a pretty girl—as her mother, a homecoming queen at UC, had so often told her—but she had a fresh, all-American quality that men found attractive.

Highlighted this because it’s just one of many awful descriptions of women in this book. Thanks Mike

if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

She liked Castelgard; this was a no-nonsense town, conceived and built in time of war. It had all the straightforward authenticity that she had found missing in architecture school.

Elsie had her digital camera on a tripod, snapping off shots. These would later be stitched together in the computer to make 360-degree panoramas. They would be taken at hourly intervals, to record every phase of the excavation.

In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant.

They quickly removed all his clothes down to his linen undershirt and shorts, and then there were murmurs of concern as they saw his body. “Have you been sick, squire?” one asked. “Uh, no.…” “A fever or an illness, to so weaken your body, as we see it now?” “No,” Chris said, frowning.

The fight with the guard had somehow freed her; the worst had happened, and she had survived.

“They soak the skins in chicken shit,” Chris whispered. “The nitrogen in the feces softens the leather.” “Great,” she said. “Dog shit, too.” “Great.” Chris looked back and saw more vats, and hides hanging on the racks. Here and there, stinking piles of cheesy yellow material lay heaped on the ground—fat scraped from the inside of the skins. Kate said, “My eyes burn.” Chris pointed to the white crust on the vats around them. These were lime vats, a harsh alkali solution that removed all the hair and remaining flesh after the skins were scraped. And it was the lime fumes that burned their eyes.

In fact, the industrial mechanization that became a characteristic feature of the West

The greatest source of power available at the time—water power—was aggressively developed, and employed to do ever more kinds of work: not only grinding grain but fulling cloth, blacksmithing, beer mashing, woodworking, mixing mortar and cement, papermaking, rope making, oil pressing, preparing dyes for cloth, and powering bellows to heat blast furnaces for steel. All over Europe, rivers were dammed, and dammed again half a mile downstream; mill boats were tethered beneath every bridge. In some places, cascades of mills, one after another, successively used the energy of flowing water.

Yesterday morning we went hunting and returned haveless, with not so much as a roebuck to show. And the men of Cervole had not yet arrived. Now they are here—two thousand of them. What game they do not take, they frighten off. It will be months before the forests settle again.

windowpanes made of translucent pig bladders. There were candles in the windows, but they were outside the pig bladders, instead of inside the room itself.

arsenal.

The original recipe—one part charcoal, one part sulfur, six parts saltpeter—had come from China.

“In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.