Timeline

Michael Crichton’s novel opens on the threshold of the twenty-first century, in a world of accelerating technological advances. Information moves instantly without wires, computers are built from single molecules, and the emerging field of quantum technology makes it possible to actualize moments of the past. A group of historians uses this capability to enter, literally, life in fourteenth-century feudal France. The book foregrounds the contrast between cutting-edge science and the complex realities of medieval society and raises the immediate question of what risks such a journey entails.