The Chronoliths

As a newbie to the brain of Robert Charles Wilson -- of his other novels, I've only read Darwinia -- I was prepared for big questions with few answers. I was not disappointed. The story here is not one of overt heroics or melodramatic clashes but rather the quiet, bewildering moments of humanity as our collective "buckets of grief." We grieve for the world as it was, the world as it could be, and eventually the world as it is: infrastructure crumbling, paranoia swelling, violence reigning. Not that the story ends without hope, because it does. But I asked myself as I turned the final page if, even as we learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. The central idea of time travel is paired with the idea of belief, and how what we expect to be true or significant (or moral, or just ... I could go on) informs the landscape of our future. In a way, we are all constantly time-traveling, remembering the parts of our past to paint us in our best light, only seeing the interesting and shiny parts of our present. We build the future; we build our monuments to the future. Once again, Robert Charles Wilson asks important questions and leaves it to us to find our own answers.

A book about mysterious monoliths popping up all over the Earth? In December 2020, how could I resist? About one half of The Chronoliths concerns the title plot, which is a doozy. It begins right away with an uncanny event: a vast, strange monolith sudden appears in Thailand. It's inexplicable in its construction and appearance, but it also bears another puzzle. Text running along the thing proclaim it to commemorate a spectacular victory... taking place in the future. (Hence the name, chronolith) Then another such object appears, elsewhere in southeast Asia. And that plot kicks off, as we spend the rest of the novel trying to understand what these things are, what they mean, how they got here, and how they change the world. This fascinated me and kept me reading later at night than I wanted to. That much of Chronoliths is a fine sf thriller. The novel's other half studies several characters as they move in and out of the mystery over time. Our point of view character, Scotty, is a computer coder who saw the first chronolith right after it arrived. His wife and daughter are important characters alongside him, as well as an expat/wastrel/drug dealer and a brilliant scientist working on the mystery. On the one hand these characters serve to humanize the vast mystery. On the other... this is the novel's weak point. Scotty is a balanced character, yes, mixing flaws and strengths, but is mostly just unpleasant to spend time with. Scotty is annoying, dull, and usually seeks to disengage from the world. The other characters are potentially more interesting, but we don't really get to see much of them through Scott's eyes. Honestly, I'd much rather have had chapters from any other character that wasn't him. Now, The Chronoliths dates from 2001, before the war on terror, so there's the interesting reading experiencing of reading an imagined future that is the reader's own past/present. Technologies are underplayed - no smartphones, not as much internet - and Islam only appears once. Instead, the book is more focused on Asia, which might turn out to be prescient for the 21st century after all. Recommended.