The Chronoliths

By: Robert Charles Wilson

Narrated by: Oliver Wyman

Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past - and soon to be haunted by the future. In early 21st-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory - 16 years in the future.

Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok - obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note?

Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange loop of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.

©2002 Robert Charles Wilson (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Unexpectedly Brilliant

I bought this book, only vaguely curious yet I was pleasantly surprised. The book is binding, the story paced well and perfectly balanced between personal history and global events. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Fascinating Look at Possible 21st Century

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes and I have. Robert Charles Wilson gives us a walk through a future world where lives have been shattered by the coming of the Chronoliths. Mr. Wilson is not only able to imagine that reality and the physics surrounding such events, but he shows us his characters growth and change throughout his lifetime and looking into the future from there. This is one journey you don't want to miss.

Entertaining

The Chronoliths is a story about people, and one mans journey through world changing events more than it is about the objects themselves. RCW's stories have always been more about the characters than the sci-fi, and Chronoliths is no different. Don't expect hard sci-fi, don't expect obvious villains and good guys, instead look forward to an entertaining tale about causality, destiny and time.
I enjoyed the narration, Wyman speaks clearly, although the voice he uses for female characters sometimes sounds a little timid and weak.

Pretty Darn Good.

I love a book that successfully straddles the boundary between the believable and the highly unlikely.

Promising, but ultimately unsatisfying

This scifi story felt, to me, to be a huge, expensive investment...with an hour-long let down. Every time I wanted to get into the detailed scifi of it, the main character "can't remember all the details" or "not gonna go into the science of it." Waaay too much character development and environmental description. Dude, we don't care about the swallow rising up into the air, we want Sue's head blown off. We want a more detailed description and reason for the Chronoliths, we want the final coicedence name to match, not be close. Darwinia gave the answers, solved the puzzle, and provided a balance of scifi and classic storytelling. This book is like Prometheus with 90% of the scifi cut out. To add insult to injury, the narrator gives everyone the same exact voices as Gateway. Hitch=Dane, Etc. Did Frederick Pohl write this book? It sounded like it. Man, I wanted so bad to write in after the Mexico stone.....we looked out over the untold number of frozen dead......barely even a mention. Yet a ditch by a van gets 20 minutes of detailed explanation. I was so bummed in the end. Oh well, just some old, forgotten monuments from the future....the future generations forgetting society's past mistakes blah, blah.....hey look! A blue silicate stone! Cool! C'mon, man, how about Kuine revealing himself? Or having the connection involve an ancient Chinese past as well as the future? Or some alien involvement? Or some future soldiers emerging? Anything but an aging Gilford Law's somber reflection

Seriously folks, stick with Darwinia.

An ok story

The story running alongside the chronoliths was not to my liking and I did not care for it. But the story of just the cronoliths was kind on interesting although really drug out

Apt for our times

Terrific narration of a relatively slow moving story. Speaks to our times because of the warring factions and the willingness of humans to create divisions where none are necessary.

good writing kept me going

Some writers just know how to put words and thoughts together well enough that you have to listen. This book is depressing and exciting. I am not a fan of books with bleak outlooks, but RW is such a good writer that he can keep your interest with his thoughts, even though you may not like the subject matter. The science in this is exciting, but seems to be a very small part of the book until toward the end. It is written as a narrative, which is not my favorite style. Often in the book he mentions how awful something is and then follows that with, but not as awful as it would become. I believe these type of teasers to be a cheap way out for the writer, and it is especially cheap if the ending does not live up to the billing. Through 75% of it, the book had my full attention, but toward the end my mind started to wonder and I was a little disappointed in the ending, though it keep true to the mood of the whole book.

It may sound like I am hard on the book, but I did give it 4 stars which I do not do lightly. I think it is worth the money, it just might not be your favorite. If you have not read RW, then you should start with Spin.

Less interesting than other Wilson titles

By chance, I read this right before reading H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and although the two books are separated by more than a century, they clearly share the same basic genetic code. Immense objects appear from out of nowhere, gouging tracks of devastation into the landscape. The objects are beyond human technology and quickly begin to wreak havoc on the Current World Order. The protagonist, our Everyman (who is a white male in both books), accidentally finds himself caught up in the Thick of Things and is there for every Significant Plot Development.

I realize I am sounding cynical and I don’t mean to. In fact, I quite enjoyed The Chronoliths. It is only due to a happy circumstance of timing that I am able to make this comparison between it and that masterpiece of Victorian speculative literature . . . revealing that perhaps not that much has changed in the intervening century. As far as science fiction goes, that may not be such a bad thing. But, unlike other Wilson novels, I thought this one had less interesting ideas in it, and ended with a bit of a whimper.

[I listened to this as an audio book. The narrator, Oliver Wyman, did a fantastic job. As he did on the Z.A. Recht Morningstar Virus books, here he changes voices for every character, helping the listener keep everyone straight. I particularly liked the way he voiced the women, especially Sulasmith Chopra, the scientist who is obsessed with discovering the time-warping secret behind the man responsible for sending the Chronoliths into the past.]

Good story, awkward narration

Excellent classic SF.
Marred by the narrator's persistent mispronunciation of certain words. E.g., the Aneid pronounced as A-NIDE. About a dozen others like this, too.