The Chronoliths

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The Chronoliths is a Sci-Fi novel by American-Canadian author Robert Charles Wilson. It revolves about the appearance in the world of destructive and indestructible monuments, with inscriptions that talk about military victories of someone named Kuin, and dated between now and around half a century hence.

The main characters are Scott Warden, a programming expert whose life is ripped apart by events connected to the appearance of the Chronoliths, Sulamith "Sue" Chopra, a scientist devoted to study them, Morris Torrance and Hitch Paley, a former criminal and a former FBI agent who aid her, Janice and Kaitlin, respectively ex-wife and daughter of Scott, Adam Mills, the main antagonist, and his mother Ashlee.

Tropes used in The Chronoliths include:
  • All There in the Manual: Averted. Most cultural references are made as addressing someone who already knows them.
  • Antagonistic Offspring: Ashlee's son Adam, a psychopathic devotee of Kuin who has his mother tortured for information and his stepsister gang-raped.
  • Anti-Hero: Hitch, definitely. He's somewhere between a Type IV and a Type V. Scott may well be a Type I. Even Sue, with her delusions, has aspects of this.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: All the Tau-technology used to create the Chronoliths.
  • The Atoner: Scott spents several chapters doing this.
  • Badass Biker: Adam Mills and his gang of Kuin loyalists.
  • Badass Bookworm: Ray, Sue, and Scott.
  • Big Bad: Adam.
  • Black Shirt: Adam Mills, Whitman Delahunt, and the rest of the Kuinists.
  • Blond Guys Are Evil: Adam.
  • Book Dumb: Adam was a failure in school, but as Ashlee points out, it takes a lot of brains to survive on the streets for as long as he has. Hitch is also an example.
  • Break the Cutie: If something can go wrong and hurt Kaitlin, it will.
    • But at the end it all gets better, of course.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture: Inflicted by Adam on Hitch, Ashlee, and Kait.
  • Cult: There really is no better way to describe the Kuinists. They're a religious cult who believe that Kuin will reward them upon his actual appearance.
  • Dark Messiah: Kuin grows into this, with an entire quasireligious cult based around his prophesied appearance.
  • Drunk with Power: Sue has her moments. Also Kuin if he ever existed and Adam.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: At least for the characters who end up alive at the end of the novel.
  • The Fatalist: Sue.
  • The Ghost: Pop diva Lux Ebone.
  • Gayngst: Averted. Sue has many problems, but having to defend her orientation is not one of them.
  • He Who Must Not Be Seen: Played straight with Kuin. And to the very ultimate extreme
  • The Heavy: Adam, who moves the storyline, is the only disciple of Kuin to actually have a face and may in fact be Kuin himself.
  • Incompatible Orientation: Supergenius Ray has a crush on the lesbian (and possibly aromantic) Sue, largely because she is one of the few people who can understand his theories.
  • Ivy League for Everyone: Scott and Janice met while attending to Cornell. Ray comes from MIT.
  • Lack of Empathy: Adam is without a conscience, and Hitch is said to love nobody.
  • Love Martyr: Ray to Sue (for the entire book), Ashlee to Adam (until the end).
  • Made of Iron: Adam manages to survive the arrival of two Chronoliths and the destruction of one without protection.
    • Scotty and Sue did that and also were at the arrival of the Chronolith in Jerusalem, but most of the time they were inside bunkers.
  • Mama Bear: Ashlee and Janice.
  • Meaningful Name: Maybe -- Adam Quinn Mills
  • No One Could Survive That: Half of the justification for leaving Portillo without Adam (the other half is that, were he alive, he would not want to go, and he's also terribly unpleasant). It goes as well as one might expect.
  • Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: Scott, Sue, Hitch, Ray, Moris, and Ashlee are all middle-aged. Adam is barely into his twenties.
  • Papa Wolf: Scotty.
  • Pop-Cultured Badass: A couple of character muse poetically about how their situation is like (or not like) Scrooge's in A Christmas Carol
  • Rape as Drama: Happens to Kait at least once, probably twice; also in Ashlee's personal history prior to the events of the book.
  • Religion of Evil: The ever-growing cult of Kuin.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Sue does this about the creation of Wyoming's chronolith.
  • The Sociopath: Adam, explicitly.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The Chronoliths get bigger and bigger as the story advances.
  • Stable Time Loop: According to Sue, the causal-acausal math works out -- in nine-dimensional spacetime geometries. To what extent that's true is unclear, but it sure has a loopy flavour.
  • Take Over the World: What Kuin will eventually do. Supposedly.
  • Teens Are Monsters: Adam has been engaging in sociopathic, self-destructive behaviour since before he was 17.
  • The Call Knows Where You Live: Even before you move there.
  • You Already Changed the Past: Perhaps. See Stable Time Loop.
  • You Can't Fight Fate: Played straight with the events marked in Chronoliths, and more ambiguously with the lives of the characters.
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