Easy to read and moderately entertaining. I didn’t feel much engagement with the characters, unfortunately, and would have liked more time in the time travel parts. Yay for mammoths though.

MammothBy John VarleyI was completely enthralled with this novel! It has everything I love in a book! There's an archaeological find that has a well preserved Mammoth, a man with a modern wrist watch, a metal case (time machine), and a message. A billionaire with a desire to pay the best people to use the mammoth sperm to impregnate an elephant, and get the time machine to work. This is the story of the billionaire, the math genius, and the elephant specialist. It's a wild ride, non-stop intrigu...

Multi-billionaire Howard has a “thing” for elephants and mammoths. When he gets his hands on a frozen excavated mammoth, he hires elephant trainer Susan to help impregnate an elephant to create an elephant-mammoth hybrid. Also with that frozen excavated mammoth was found a Stone Age man – with a wristwatch! And a box. Howard figures the box is a time machine and he hires genius mathematician Matt to figure it out. I really liked this. It started off fast paced, and there were plenty of other fas...

3.5 stars

Dig if you will this premise:An eccentric billionaire needs a mammoth to clone. One is located in a Canadian province. During the excavation process, it is discovered that huddled next to the creature is the body of a Stone Age man around 12,000 years old.He is wearing a wristwatch.Dun dun duuuun!!!I let out a little squeal when I read that, and The Twilight Zone theme started playing in my head. And, did the book live up to the premise? Well, yes and no . . .The characters were lifeless stereot...

This book started out with GREAT potential! I was hooked early on, but the story lost a bit toward the end. I would have given it 3.5 if possible, just because the beginning was so good.

I enjoyed this time-travelling adventure, still musing about the star-rating it deserves. Was it really a four-star read, or was it just so much more fun than my current book club selection, which is boring me mightily? I think I’ll leave it at the 4 stars.A billionaire who is obsessed with prehistoric animals is having a frozen mammoth excavated from the barren wilderness of Nunavut with plans of cloning it. As the excavation advances, it becomes obvious that there is also a person frozen into ...

[7/10] A good story, it reads more like a thriller than a SF genre book. It has some speculations on time travel and the nature of reality, but they feel a little shoehorned into the story.I liked the main characters: the slightly addled mathematician, the spirited elephant handler, the nerdy billionaire. I picked this up mainly to read about mammoths and the book did the job in an entertaining way. The storytelling is functional, without many wow elements or impressive metaphors, but also well ...

This book is probably better suited to a young teenager into mammoths and time travel. Easy holiday read but no depth to the characters and more holes in the plot than a fishing net. Basically multimillionaire business man, funds mammoth dig project, man with watch found next to mammoth... therefore time travel must exist. Millionaire then starts funding 2 parallel programmes, one into cloning mammoths and the other into time travel. Boy meets girl, strange things happen, and predictably everyon...

I hadn't realized how much I have missed reading Varley until getting into this.The title, and the premise as described on the jacket, didn't do anything for me, but as I have always enjoyed a John Varley book I decided to read this as well, and am glad I did!Varley has a way of engaging the reader, bringing us into his story, rather than keeping us as observers.This is not Varley's best ... there are a number of "problems" I had with it, and it was moderately easy to predict the outcome, but a ...