It's not time travel, an ITC vice president insists vehemently. Time travel is impossible. Regardless, the professor has to be rescued by someone familiar with the medieval monastery he visited, and presumably familiar with his habits and with the time period. Johnston's assistants agree, but they quickly find out that their knowledge of the real truth behind the written history is limited at best. The amazing financial success of the Jurassic Park movie adaptation may have been the last nail in the coffin of Michael Crichton's literary ambition.
Timeline takes that trend to a new low.
It's crammed with enough glib pseudo-scientific theorizing and medieval factoids to resemble Crichton's earlier, more erudite books, but it's also crammed with chases, explosions, and plot holes that a T. Rex could amble through. Much of Timeline 's weaknesses and omissions look like sheer laziness on the part of the writer. The sequence of events that trapped Johnston makes little sense, so it's glossed over. The book's opening segments, involving an ITC employee whose strange medical condition drags a small-town policeman and doctor into ITC's secret project, are dismissed offhandedly in one sentence midway through the book. The book's major antagonist pops up from nowhere for a few chase scenes and is never anything more than a vague bogey.