Timeline

Timeline is a science fiction novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, his twelfth under his own name and twenty-second overall, published in November 1999. It tells the story of a group of history students who travel to fourteenth-century France to rescue their professor, and it continues Crichton's practice of combining science, technical detail and action.

The novel's technical material is quantum and multiverse theory, which is how the travel is justified in the plot. Because the characters are historians working on a dig in the region they then visit, the book can compare what they expected from documents with what the setting is actually like, which is the device that distinguishes it from a straightforward adventure in the past.

The book spawned Timeline Computer Entertainment, a game developer that produced a Timeline PC game published by Eidos Interactive in 2000, and a film based on the novel was released in 2003. The professor's rescue is the deadline, and the travellers are historians rather than soldiers, so their knowledge is the only advantage they have. The fourteenth century arrives through the material details of the place rather than through exposition.