Cover blurb
Multibillionaire Howard Christian is one of the wealthiest—and most eccentric—men in the country. Not content with investing his fortune and watching it grow, he buys rare cars that he actually drives, acquires collectible toys that he actually plays with, and builds buildings that defy imagination. But how 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 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 much more…
My thoughts
Mammoth opens with an excerpt from a fictional children’s book about the life of “Little Fuzzy,” a young mammoth that is famous in the near future in which the novel is set. The narrative then jumps to chapter five—the chapter titles are out of order, so don’t let that trip you up—where a team of scientists is excavating the perfectly preserved remains of a mammoth in the Alaskan tundra. Still, the most extraordinary find isn’t the mammoth, but the accompanying remains of a man wearing a wristwatch and holding a briefcase that just may contain a time machine.
The funder of the dig—billionaire Howard Christian—bribes the excavation team to keep the find a secret. He wants to use DNA from the mammoth to resurrect the species via cloning. He also wants to figure out how to get the time machine working again. For the latter, he hires Matthew Wright, a mathematician so brilliant that his gift has affected his ability to interact with other people. (I hesitate to say Matt is on the autism spectrum, but his character is coded as such.) Matt jumps at the opportunity, but over the course of his research, he falls in love with former circus trainer Susan Morgan, who has been hired by Howard to raise the cloned mammoths. Matt eventually gets the time machine working, setting off a series of events that will change his and Susan’s lives forever.
Mammoth is a wild ride because author John Varley never settles on what type of story he wants to tell. The novel opens as a murder mystery, with the victim being a modern man found next to the remains of a 12,000-year-old mammoth. It then veers into prehistoric survival, then monster-rampaging-in-the-city disaster flick, then government conspiracy thriller, then Free Willy, and finally, a love story. I could never figure out where Varley was heading with the narrative, which can be a plus or a negative, depending on your tastes. There are a few well-written action scenes, and the characters are more interesting than most humans that populate paleofiction. That said, the romance between Matt and Susan could have been fleshed out as it starts to strain credibility by the latter half of the book, given the events that take place. (I’m trying to avoid spoilers.) Varley also does a good job bringing to life mammoth society—it is just a shame we ultimately spend relatively little time with the animals despite the cover title.
I enjoyed Mammoth but it is not a novel I can wholeheartedly recommend. The plot meanders a lot, promising a certain type of story before becoming something else entirely, and I would have liked to have spent more time with the mammoths and their world. But if you are willing to go along for the ride, you could do worse.
Trivia
- Varley is a prolific sci-fi writer whose works have been adapted for film twice. His short story “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” was adapted into a Canadian TV movie of the same name, which was later mocked as a movie-of-the-week on Mystery Science Theater 3000. He also wrote the short story “Air Raid,” later expanding it into the novel Millennium, which served as the basis of a 1989 film starring Kris Kristofferson. The story and film are about time travelers from the future who kidnap modern-day humans just before they die in plane crashes. Varley includes an inside joke about his novel in Mammoth, when Matt talks about his research into time travel: “I read every science fiction story I could get my hands on, from H.G. Wells to some ridiculous thing about taking people off airplanes before they were about to crash.”
- Howard’s plan to resurrect a mammoth by cloning is based on real-life plans to bring back the species by mixing mammoth DNA with that of their closest living relative, the Indian elephant. The ethics are dubious, at best.
Prehistoric Pulp 