Mammoth

Plot has plenty of twists and turns. Kept me engrossed to the end.

Entertaining romp that never really fully delivers. The concept was better than the final product in my opinion. Far from the worst novel I have ever read but not the best either. Half decent.Ray Smillie

Interesting and fun, a great original adventure tale. The only thing missing is predictability, which is good for a circular novel.I'd say the best novel written by John Varley that I have read.

Bought this on basis that it was supposed to be one of the 'best' science fiction books of all time. Wasn't disappointed

Despite a lifetime reading Sci-Fi, I’d never found the time to read any John Varley. Given this book, it’s hard to believe I’ve missed anything.Rather than the rollicking adventure I’d expect of an author compared- absurdly on the strength of this volume- to Heinlein, I found a Dan Brown novel with all the hard edges knocked off and bowdlerised for a teenage audience.Stereotypical and two-dimensional are about as polite as one can be about the “characters”, and quite large sections of the book just become rather laughable. There is one decent passage towards the end about one character’s antics in the past, but even this is filled with rather sad moralising.There is, it is true, a bit of come-uppance about the whole thing, but the time-travel when it pops up seems to be used to reinvigorate a dying plot rather than as an integral part of it. Time loops and paradoxes are used the same way. Given the opportunity, quite a let-down.Like Dan Brown, unchallenging airport and flight reading, but nothing else. I can’t say I don’t like it, but it’s certainly not terribly good. Three stars is probably a half star generous, and as everyone knows, I’m a pushover.

Absolutely brilliant book great plot and excellent ending. Such a good read

If you read the blurb on the back you think you can guess the plot. You'd be wrong.A dead mammoth, a millionaire and a time machine, could make for a silly romp, but of course John Varley is too good an author not to come up with something more thoughtful than that. The science is accurate as always and he obviously knows a lot about mammoths.The exciting story line and well rounded characters keep you hooked to the very end.

The quality of John Varley's very best writing is quite out of this world. When he's not at his very best he's still pretty good. This book is very good.Billionaire Howard Christian, a character who appears to be loosely based on Howard Hughes but makes him look normal, has been seeking to clone a mammoth. His agents find a superb specimen which has been well preserved in frozen ice for 12,000 years and start digging it out to begin the process. Then they find beside the mammoth the frozen bodies of a man and a woman who also appear to have been there for 12,000 years - but the man is wearing a wristwatch and holding an unusual artifact.That is only the start of some seriously weird events. The plot has a lot of twists and turns, some of which the reader may see coming but most of which probably won't turn out in quite the way you expect.Interspersed in the text, with a little chunk of about two pages at a time between each chapter of the main narrative, is the story of a mammoth called Fuzzy from his conception and birth in about 10,000 BC to - well, you'll have to read it to see.Character development in the book is fairly good, although Varley has done better. Howard Christian is a very strange individual who has lots of obsessions and you keep wondering if he is going to flip over to outright evil. His chief fixer is a man called Warburton who might have been interesting to explore in more depth but appears in most of the book as a shadowy figure who organises whatever Christian wants done. At the very end of the story Warburton takes on a bit more personality, as does Christian's filmstar girlfriend, Andrea de la Terre.The main sympathetic human character is Matt Wright, a scientist who specialises in the physics of time and who is brought in by Christian to investigate some peculiar artifacts found with the frozen man. Another sympathetic human character is Susan Morgan, an elephant handler brought in to look after the elephants involved in Christian's attempts to clone the mammoth. Neither Matt nor Susan is a creation in the same league as Varley's best characters such as Sirocco Jones or Gaby, but both are sufficiently well drawn as to make you care about what happens to them. The most interesting characters in the book are the elephants and mammoths, several of whom Varley manages to invest with real but plausible personality.I doubt if this one will add to Varley's stock of Nebula and Hugo awards, but it does qualify as extremely entertaining and well worth a read.