So there you are, dear reader, engrossed in an interesting story about two airplanes smashing into one another, and of a man named Bill Smith who’s trying to find why. And then, perhaps a half hour into your reading journey, you’re suddenly fifty thousand years into the future, and the actions of an airplane accident investigator are a matter of survival for the entire human race. Millenium is a story told in two parts: the first, taking place in the 1980s and following an increasingly confused airline accident investigator who keeps finding inexplicable details about an airline crash, and the second following a woman from a dying society who are attempting to save the human race from total extinction. The premise is fascinating and gloomy, but contains a warning worth heeding. For aviation-tech fans, it’s a fun period piece.

It is impossible for me to rate this book fairly, as I encountered its story first through the film adaptation of it, produced in 1989. I had no idea it was based on a novel until this past weekend, and immediately searched for it online. This is not the place to compare the two, but suffice it to say my enjoyment of the story in one medium was married to my enjoyment of it in the another — and the movie was one of the first SF titles I ever watched, and have returned to several times over the last 20+ years. As literature, its most compelling asset is its premise. Bill Smith keeps encountering a strange but beautiful woman who doesn’t seem to recognize him despite their having a torrid affair at one point in the story, and the frequency of her appearances increases as he finds strange things in the wreck he’s investigating. Why are the passengers’ watches running backwards? Why does the flight recorder have a pilot screaming like a horrified child because the passengers are dead and burned even though the jet was still in the air at that point? We start getting hints as to what’s happening by the every-other chapters, which follow the female agent Louise. She’s from the last remnant of humanity, in a future where our numbers have been destroyed by atomic wars, and our bodies ravaged by genetically-modified diseases that we cannot escape from: people are born compromised, and live only a couple of decades on average, and that only by steadily replacing their organs with synthetics or becoming organic parts of fixed machines. There are only a few hundred humans left, but they have the ability to transport back into time — which they use to abduct humans who are about to die (third-class passengers trapped on the Titanic, for instance), in the hopes of finding a place where humanity can be resettled.

As fascinating as the plot is, there’s a lot of strangeness to it ,especially the idea that Louise comes from fifty thousand years in the future. Varley doesn’t go into extensive worldbuilding beyond alluding to the wasteland 20th century humanity created through environmental degradation, atomic weapons, and then bioengineering attacks, but it’s improbable to me that the same species capable of genetic weapons couldn’t also be able to create genetic shields — and frankly, blaming a few decades’ worth of humans from fifty thousand years in the future is both sad and amusing. That’s a lot of time to curse the darkness instead of finding a way to create a light. It’s definitely an environmental-awareness kind of novel, but would have made more sense if it were set closer to home — say, the late 22nd or 23rd century. Still, the weird premise goes a long way to creating an interesting story, especially with the horrifying view of humanity in its last days — a bit of organic film atop a machine, a mere residue. It’s very chilling. I watched the film last night, so reads-to-reels to follow.

Currently finishing Facebook: The Inside Story.