The time of our tale is only a few years in the future. But several significant developments have granted a new, hopeful cast to the world. And many of these developments stem directly from one man: a quirky multi-billionaire named Howard Christian.

Christian began his adult life as a neurotic genius (his kleptomaniac tendencies are just one of his personal psychological glitches). Still young, he perfected nanotech and nuclear fusion. Needless to say, wealth flowed in like a gusher. Nowadays, he spends his money on whatever project seems likely to offer him some intellectual stimulation and potential public glory. One bee in Christian's bonnet at the moment is the desire to recreate a woolly mammoth through the cloning of frozen mammoth corpses. Christian's found the perfect preserved specimen, in the far northern reaches of Canada.

But then his team doing the excavation informs him of an anomaly: frozen next to the mammoth are the corpses of a modern man and woman. And their crushed time machine.

Naturally Christian spins off a separate secret project to recreate the damaged time machine. He enlists theoretical mathematician Matt Wright to lead the time-machine quest. Meanwhile, elephant expert Susan Morgan is working in the lab next door on the implantation of an engineered egg containing mammoth genes into an elephant host mother.

While Susan's project is going well—despite Christian's frustrating micro-managing habits—Matt's undertaking seems like a dead end. Comprised of everyday 21st-century materials, the time machine remains an enigma. Recreating it in undamaged form, Matt has merely crafted an unfathomable non-working gadget. Or so it seems, until the machine activates itself one night, hauling Matt, Susan and her elephants back some 15,000 years into the past—when mammoths flourished.

As temporal castaways, Matt and Susan must struggle for survival in a primitive time. But their hardships are nothing compared to the chaos that will result when they are propelled forward again to modern Los Angeles, this time surrounded by a herd of fear-crazed mammoths. That's when the story of Big Mama and Little Fuzzy really begins.

New heights for an old master

It's pretty darn silly now to talk any longer about John Varley's "comeback." After three or four superb novels in the '90s and Oughts, the notion that Varley still dwells in any kind of personal literary horse latitudes is just nonsensical. The man is writing at the top of his form again, and that's just a given.

This book exhibits Varley's many virtues in captivating form.

First off, we have Varley's deft verisimilitude to praise. Like Heinlein (the first but not the last time I'll make this comparison), Varley knows "how the world works." More importantly, he can convey this knowledge in convincing, easy-to-assimilate form. Even when he's projecting the far future, as in his classic "Eight Worlds" scenario, he can make us believe that this is how a society functions, how things get done. Howard Christian, as a conglomeration of Bill Gates and Howard Hughes (and maybe one of Ayn Rand's protagonists as well) is utterly believable. We can truly buy into the mammoth cloning project (and, later, the ancient mammoth exploitation) at every step of its course. This is how things would go. The character of Warburton, Christian's loyal assistant, helps establish this believability. Constantly following behind his boss, Warburton is the practical details man who implements Christian's dreams.

The other main characters—Matt and Susan—and their love affair are likewise limned in heartfelt fashion. As a kind of Asperger's savant, Matt starts out awkward and naïve, but matures in the cauldron of events. Nor is Susan unchanged by her trials.

Next up, Varley's speculations on mammoth behavior and time travel are fascinating. The former are conveyed in a clever structural way: as excerpts from a children's book entitled Little Fuzzy, A Child of the Ice Age. The climactic revelation of who wrote this book is a kicker. As for the chrono-whimsies, suffice it to say that Varley has already exhibited his mastery of the paradoxical, which gets a fine workout here. (Included is an offhand meta-reference to one of Varley's own stories; see if you can spot it!)

Varley streamlined, micromachined, limpid prose is the final marvel here, tying everything together. This book goes down smooth as a gin and tonic mixed with glacier water. The dialogue is impeccable, and the comedic aspects of Varley's tale are in perfect balance with the pathos, which is reminiscent of the emotional charge of Heinlein's The Door Into Summer (1957).

This book is eminently filmable. I can almost cast it and watch it in my head. Instead of relying on some directorial "brainstorm," Hollywood should scoop up this book faster than a mammoth can crush a bus—which is pretty darn fast, as lucky readers will find out.