Timeline

Crichton, Michael. Timeline. New York: Random House, 1999. Available in audio cassettes, both abridged (with MC's approval) and unabridged, and audio CD (abridged).

A quantum-mechanical time-machine, of sorts, transports people to a parallel universe of Europe's high middle ages (France during the Hundred Years' War). "Time-travelers" place their bodies inside machines in our universe, where those bodies are destroyed, to be instantaneously re-transcribed in the parallel universe, without benefit of a machine. Note temporary confinement inside a machine in our world, and faith required that one's lasered bones, so to speak, will rise again in another world. Note also that Medieval World is that of recent scholarship: a time/place sophisticated in many ways, including technologically, not only in military hardware but also architecturally, and in engineering a mill. Made into a 2003 film by the same name. (RDE, 06/03/00)