The starting point of Robert Charles Wilson`s book is very simple. Huge war memorials appearing all around the Earth, usually causing a local catastrophe... and remembering victorious wars from the future. The book very convincingly shows the possible political and sociological consequences of the happenings. ( )

Scott Warden es un hombre perseguido por el pasado... y pronto también por el futuro. En la Tailandia de comienzos del siglo XXI es un vago en una comunidad costera de expatriados, cuando es testigo de un acontecimiento imposible: la aparición en el boscoso interior de un pilar de piedra de casi setenta metros. Su llegada colapsa los árboles en un cuarto de kilómetro alrededor de su base. Parece estar compuesto de una exótica forma de materia y la inscripción tallada muestra la conmemoración de una victoria militar... que tendrá lugar dentro de dieciséis años.

I really enjoyed this book. This is my third [a:Robert Charles Wilson|27276|Robert Charles Wilson|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1426178785p2/27276.jpg] book after [b:Spin|910863|Spin (Spin, #1)|Robert Charles Wilson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1406383726s/910863.jpg|47562] (which I liked immensely) and [b:Axis|116410|Axis|Robert Charles Wilson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312044997s/116410.jpg|3364117] (which I was a bit disappointed by). I like how the author can completely disrupt the entire Earth's society and yet still present relatable characters. There was a bit of hand-waving about the mechanics of the chronoliths, especially regarding cause and effect.
Overall, this made me eager to seek out other books by Wilson (even if I'm going to skip Vortex) ( )

Ugh. Jo Walton, why do you like such dreary books?

What did I enjoy about it? I'd recently read (or tried to, at least) a few books set in a far-ish future where so much had changed that the pleasure of reading was replaced with the arduous task of trying to assimilate an almost entirely new culture ... but the Chronoliths begins in a world very much like ours, and instead of a million changes, it introduces one: the arrival of a chronolith. That's the kind of SF I can get behind--what would this world be like if this 1 particular thing were different? It's manageable. So that was a relief.

Unfortunately, very little happened. We followed a tiresome, uninteresting protagonist (the true hero, Sue, was a minor supporting character ... why do authors do this?). He had no discernible personality. Nothing much happened (well, things happened, but they weren't interesting things, and they didn't really build upon each other to lead to other more interesting things ... you know, the way a Plot ought to). By the end of the book, when a character was randomly raped (there must be a trope ought there somewhere for trying to goad readers into caring by raping dull characters), I was so over it.

The men are all manly and the women are "the wife," "the girlfriend," etc., save for the aforementioned Sue. I'm a man, and found this annoying. It doesn't pass the Bechdel test either. Sometimes I wonder if certain authors mentally cast their books ... maybe Mr. Wilson is picturing Duane "The Rock" Johnson playing his protagonist, and he's chortling with glee as he imagines how much fun the character would be. But we're not picturing that, so we get Joe Bland saying boring things as he drifts around the dull book.

Not a fan, I'm afraid.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). ( )

As a newbie to the brain of Robert Charles Wilson -- of his other novels, I've only read [b:Darwinia|760961|Darwinia|Robert Charles Wilson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312060675s/760961.jpg|906164] -- I was prepared for big questions with few answers. I was not disappointed. The story here is not one of overt heroics or melodramatic clashes but rather the quiet, bewildering moments of humanity as our collective "buckets of grief." We grieve for the world as it was, the world as it could be, and eventually the world as it is: infrastructure crumbling, paranoia swelling, violence reigning.

Not that the story ends without hope, because it does. But I asked myself as I turned the final page if, even as we learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. The central idea of time travel is paired with the idea of belief, and how what we expect to be true or significant (or moral, or just ... I could go on) informs the landscape of our future. In a way, we are all constantly time-traveling, remembering the parts of our past to paint us in our best light, only seeing the interesting and shiny parts of our present. We build the future; we build our monuments to the future.

Once again, Robert Charles Wilson asks important questions and leaves it to us to find our own answers. ( )