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I picked Mammoth up semi-randomly at the library a few days ago, because I've liked a lot of Varley's earlier work (not all, but a lot) and elephants are cool..
The premise of the book is that researchers (funded by a biotech billionaire who wants to be Bruce Wayne) are working on cloning a mammoth when they stumble on a time machine; they then find themselves with an actual live mammoth born 12,000 years ago.
It's a quick read. I decided partway through that it had too much circus and not enough time travel; some people might consider this a feature rather than a bug, but what I wanted wasn't more paradoxes and mathematical hand-waving, but more Pleistocene scenery and fauna.
It would have helped if I'd been able to really care about any of the characters. The mathematician who is trying to repair the time machine is of high-quality cardboard, and the veterinarian and circus-brat who has the job of handling the mammoths is only a little more believable. The Batman-wannabe is a bully who is entirely unused to anyone saying no to him. Worse, both of the male leads, mathematician and billionaire biologist, are stereotypes of the nerd who can't communicate with anyone, and are astonished to find that a woman might actually like them. Parallelism is not always a fictional virtue. Varley at least writes as if he believes the mathematician and the vet care about each other; he doesn't get past the billionaire and his actress-fiancee's startlement at their relationship to make them seem convinced [1].
There are overlapping happy endings, most especially for the young mammoth (who is called "Fuzzy" by the circus, and "Little Fuzzy" by the interwoven aimed-at-children story-within-a-story of his life).
The paradoxical aspects of time travel are dealt with by characters concluding that if they did thus-and-such, they might change the universe to one where the time machine didn't exist, and that they like the universe as it is, so they won't do thus-and-such. Except when they decide that decent people wouldn't let that stop them, and it works out okay anyhow. The physics problems are evaded by nobody having any idea of how the thing works, and metaphors about time as roller coaster instead of smooth train ride.
[1] Out here in real life, I sometimes express surprise at having met and gotten to know my beloveds, but it doesn't surprise me at all that, having had that good fortune, I love them.
The premise of the book is that researchers (funded by a biotech billionaire who wants to be Bruce Wayne) are working on cloning a mammoth when they stumble on a time machine; they then find themselves with an actual live mammoth born 12,000 years ago.
It's a quick read. I decided partway through that it had too much circus and not enough time travel; some people might consider this a feature rather than a bug, but what I wanted wasn't more paradoxes and mathematical hand-waving, but more Pleistocene scenery and fauna.
It would have helped if I'd been able to really care about any of the characters. The mathematician who is trying to repair the time machine is of high-quality cardboard, and the veterinarian and circus-brat who has the job of handling the mammoths is only a little more believable. The Batman-wannabe is a bully who is entirely unused to anyone saying no to him. Worse, both of the male leads, mathematician and billionaire biologist, are stereotypes of the nerd who can't communicate with anyone, and are astonished to find that a woman might actually like them. Parallelism is not always a fictional virtue. Varley at least writes as if he believes the mathematician and the vet care about each other; he doesn't get past the billionaire and his actress-fiancee's startlement at their relationship to make them seem convinced [1].
There are overlapping happy endings, most especially for the young mammoth (who is called "Fuzzy" by the circus, and "Little Fuzzy" by the interwoven aimed-at-children story-within-a-story of his life).
The paradoxical aspects of time travel are dealt with by characters concluding that if they did thus-and-such, they might change the universe to one where the time machine didn't exist, and that they like the universe as it is, so they won't do thus-and-such. Except when they decide that decent people wouldn't let that stop them, and it works out okay anyhow. The physics problems are evaded by nobody having any idea of how the thing works, and metaphors about time as roller coaster instead of smooth train ride.
[1] Out here in real life, I sometimes express surprise at having met and gotten to know my beloveds, but it doesn't surprise me at all that, having had that good fortune, I love them.
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