This was the only one of the 2001 Hugo finalists for best novel that really intrigued me, so I picked it up at the library last weekend. But now I'm finding that I don't have a lot to say about this book. It was fun to read and I enjoyed it. But I don't have any outstanding positive or negative things to say about it. This is why I would never make it as a professional book reviewer.

The story revolves around the appearance of giant monuments to the conqueror Kuin. The monuments appear, seemingly out of thin air, 20 years and 3 months before the conquests they commemorate. Wilson examines, in passing, the economic, social and political effects these chronoliths have a global and national scale. The real story here is about the effect the cronoliths have on a certain group of individuals, whose personal biographies become deeply entwined with one another, and with the chronoliths themselves.

This is perhaps why the story left me unmoved. My favorite science fiction stories and novels are about human conflict in the face of change. These stories are necessarily large-scale, with a good dose of conniving and political intrigue mixed in. By focusing almost exclusively on the effects the monuments have on a small group of people, and by tossing in the societal effects only as a way to establish the setting and authenticity of the story, Wilson skipped over what I think would have been the most interesting part of this story.