Overview
Not content with investing his fortune and watching it grow, multibillionaire Howard Christian buys rare cars that he actually drives, acquires collectible toys that he actually plays with, and builds buildings that defy the imagination. But now his restless mind has turned to a new obsession: cloning a mammoth…
In a barren province of Canada, a mammoth hunter financed by Christian has made the discovery of a lifetime: an intact frozen woolly mammoth. But what he finds during the painstaking process of excavating the huge creature baffles the mind. Huddled next to the mammoth is the mummified body of a Stone Age man around 12,000 years old. And he is wearing a wristwatch.
It looks like Howard Christian is going to get his wish—and more…
Synopsis
Never afraid of risks, award-winning author John Varley took readers and critics by storm with his previous novel, Red Thunder. Now, Varley takes another leap into the great unknown with Mammoth...
In a barren province of Canada, a mammoth hunter has made the discovery of a lifetime: an intact frozen wooly mammoth. But what he finds during the painstaking process of excavating the huge creature boggles the mind. Huddled next to the mammoth is the mummified body of a Stone Age man around 12,000 years old. And he is wearing a wristwatch.
Publishers Weekly
When eccentric megabillionaire Howard Christian commissions a hunt for a frozen mammoth in northern Manitoba to clone a new model in Varley's rollicking, bittersweet tale of time travel and ecology, he gets more than he bargained for: next to the 12,000-year-old beast his team unearths lies the body of a human being, wearing a wristwatch, with a metal box-a time machine?-nearby. Christian hires Matt Wright, Canada's top scientist on the physics of time, to fix the machine, and employs elephant vet Susan Morgan to oversee the cloning of a new mammoth. The machine hurls Matt and Susan back to the mammoth age, then forward again, along with a baby Columbian woolly mammoth, Fuzzy, whose engaging story cleverly alternates with Christian's indefatigable quest for personal fame. Varley's sparkling wit pulls one surprise after another out of this unconventional blend of science and social commentary with real people convincingly doing unreal things. Fuzzy, though, is the true hero, an irresistible 15-foot-tall reminder of the wonders of nature and imagination. The winner of numerous Hugo and Nebula awards, Varley (Millennium) should garner new laurels with this outstanding effort. Agent, Kirby McCauley at the Pimlico Agency. (June 7) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewThis novel from science fiction icon John Varley (The Ophiuchi Hotline, Steel Beach, the Gaea trilogy, et al.) is a time-travel adventure with a big, fat, hairy twist -- one that includes a two-ton baby woolly mammoth named Fuzzy that is 12,000 years from home. When Howard Christian, a maverick billionaire, discovers what he believes to be a time-travel device next to an intact woolly mammoth in a remote Canadian territory, he gathers together world-renowned experts to help him achieve two very different -- and top-secret -- goals: to clone a new mammoth from the dead animal's frozen spermatozoa and to somehow unlock the secrets to the strange mechanism, which have the words "HAD A GOOD LIFE NO REGRE" scratched onto its metallic surface. He hires Dr. Susan Morgan to head the project that will implant the mammoth embryo in a modern-day elephant and assigns Matthew Wright, a genius mathematician, to figure out how the time-travel device works. What Christian doesn't tell them is that a mummified man and woman, dressed in Stone Age animal furs, were also found next to the mammoth and the time-travel device -- and the man was wearing a wristwatch! In Mammoth, Varley is as outrageous and entertaining as ever -- and just when readers think they have this paradoxical mystery figured out, he throws in an elephantine plot twist guaranteed to drop jaws and boggle minds. Two tusks up. Paul Goat Allen