7.
Mammoth, by John Varley
In a barren province of Canada, a mammoth hunter has made the discovery of a lifetime: an intact frozen woolly mammoth. But what he finds during the painstaking process of excavating the huge creature boggles 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.
I enjoyed this book. John Varley presents a well-written tale of time travel (and also references other time travel tales, like
The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells and
Back to the Future). A wealthy man with an obsession with cloning a mammoth, Howard Christian, hires a mathematician, Matt Wright, to figure out how the time machine found with the body of the Stone Age man works (for it must be a time machine; how else would the man have gotten a watch?)
Matt never does figure out exactly how the time machine works, though it takes him and his elephant trainer girlfriend, Susan Morgan, back to Ice Age California, circa 12,000 years ago, then sends them and a herd of mammoths back to contemporary Los Angeles. Howard never figures it out, either, even after the machine works one more time, sending him and his movie star girlfriend, Andrea de la Terre, back in time about 12,000 years (but not exactly to the same time; it's apparently somewhat earlier).
As it turns out, the caveman wearing a watch is Howard himself, bringing up a conundrum -- how does the living Howard in the 21st century manage to exist at the same time as his corpse, which died 12,000 years ago?
