Customer Reviews

The Accidental Time Machine

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(43)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I've often said that Joe Haldeman is the most interesting and talented Science Fiction writer of our time. He is an artisan who experiments with different writing styles, yet always manages to be a master storyteller. Haldeman's current novel does not disappoint. Like his classic "Forever War", he creates a novel whose protagonist is thrust across millennia; but, this is an entirely different treatment of the topic. Haldeman seems to prefer a very compact writing style and his current novel is a clinic on how to implement it correctly. Overall, I think this is one of Haldeman's best. The wordsmithing is excellent. The story is well-told and one of the most humorous novels he has written.

You write what you know, and Joe has pulled from his professorial experiences at MIT to write a very playful tribute to that Institution, its professors, and its students. But, you'll appreciate the references regardless of your background. His characters are quirky and well-developed. The situations he creates for his protagonist range from the mundane to the absurd as he explores differing views on science and technology and what the future may hold. You will also find some pointed commentary about the relationship of current politics to science as well.

Within this framework, Haldeman has interwoven a story of a man coming of age and discovering himself in the process. Told with great humor and affection, this novel will please both Haldeman fans and those who have not previously read his works. I wish I had a time machine to see what Haldeman has for us next! I most highly recommend it!!

The Accidental Time Machine is a pleasant, although shallow story about an accidental time traveler. It follows the misadventures of Matt Fuller, a somewhat unsuccessful physics student at MIT. One day while working with a piece of equipment he built he discovers, to his surprise, that it works as a time machine! He tries to duplicate it but it won't work, but does figure out how to use it to travel through time himself. As he travels further forward in time we see major changes in the earth and humanity. In one era he runs across a theocracy and again, accidentally, ends up taking along Martha, an innocent, beautiful woman who has grown up in a religious culture. This leads to some rather humorous adventures between the two as they move even further forward in time where humans seem to have left the earth. But how to get back? Well, I don't want to give away too much of the story.

Overall this is an entertaining, quick read. The only drawback is the lack of drama or emotion displayed by the characters as they are thrust into very different circumstances than the one they are used to and the somewhat quick, hollow treatment of the future worlds they discover. As the title might suggest, this is a lighthearted, humorous adventure.

_The Accidental Time Machine_ by Joe Haldeman is a fun, quick read, one I thoroughly enjoyed. Not perhaps ultra deep, as the book does not tackle any of the great questions of life or of science fiction, but it was an enjoyable time travel romp, the story of one man and later a companion of his and their journey farther and farther into the future.

The main character is Matt Fuller, a graduate school dropout of sorts (forever putting off finishing his Ph.D), barely eking out a living working as a lab assistant at MIT. Working with Dr. Marsh, he discovers that a machine he had put together for the professor, a simple device designed to emit a single photon, a calibration device that was part of a larger experiment that Dr. Marsh was working on, had the power to vanish. Matt pushed the button on the machine and the device disappeared, reappearing a second and a half later. The professor of course didn't see this happen, assumed, not incorrectly, that Matt had had too little sleep and real food (other than Twinkies and coffee), and should go on home for the evening. Matt pushed the button again, and the machine dutifully vanished, then reappeared 15 seconds later. Naturally, Dr. Marsh didn't see this event either.

The machine was not designed to move at all, either in time or space, and Matt had no idea how or why the device was vanishing and reappearing. All he knew was that it was big news, that unless he had proof Dr. Marsh and others would assume he was on drugs and/or insane, and that he had to get more "scientific" about his study of it. Essentially stealing the device, Matt set up a somewhat more controlled environment at home, worked out the math, and figured out that the device would be gone in ever larger increments and also reappear slightly farther away each time. His calculations showed for instance that a fifth push of the button would cause it to vanish for 6 hours and 48 minutes, then 3.34 days, and then 465 days, and then for about 15 years (and also physically farther and farther away from its original position).

Getting ever more elaborate with his experiments after each jump, after one of the jumps he decides to see - after verifying a newly bought pet turtle survived the jumps - to see if he could jump with the machine. Talking an acquaintance of his into letting him sit in his old-fashioned all-metal car (as apparently anything metal in contact with the device along with that thing's contents jumped as well), Matt got in the car, pushed the button...and well, found himself in the near future, wanted for murder of the car's owner, who apparently dropped dead when his car with Matt inside it vanished, thus beginning Matt's adventures through time, jumping ever forward into the future to escape one predicament after another.

The first few jumps were to a futuristic world but still quite recognizable to Matt, but the farther future - 177.5 years or so into the future, then to the 45th century, then several million years - produced ever stranger worlds and people.

Is Matt ever able to find someone in the future who understands time travel, to enable him to go back into the past? What does fate hold in store for Matt? A fun book, though I am not sure I entirely understood the ending, I nevertheless enjoyed it.

The Accidental Time Machine (2007) is a standalone SF novel. It is a time travel tale, set initially in the near future and then further uptime.

In this novel, Matthew Fuller is a geek and a graduate assistant at MIT. While he is working for Dr. Marsh, Matt builds a calibrator -- it emits one photon per chronon -- that also happens to travel in time. Whenever he pushes the reset button, it disappears and then reappears.

The first time it disappears, Matt calls for Marsh to come see, but the calibrator returns before his boss responds. Marsh thinks he has been awake too long and suggests that he get some rest. Then Marsh leaves to get a little sleep himself.

Matt figures that thirty hours without sleep is not unreasonable and starts testing the device. The next time he presses the button, the device is gone for over ten seconds. Oops!

He decides to get a little more precise in the timing. For the third trial, he checks his watch before pushing the button and the box is gone for slightly less than three minutes. For the next trial, he clocks the disappearance with the stopwatch function: 34 minutes, 33.22 seconds.

When Matt plots the intervals between disappearance and reappearance on semi-log paper, they seem to be increasing in a logarithmic function. Each event takes about twelve times as long as the previous event. He calculates that the next interval probably would be around six hours, so he decides to check it at home.

In this story, Matt blocks the reset button and wraps the device in two trash-can liners. Then he carries the device through the snow to the Red Line and then from the East Lexington station to his apartment. Naturally, he hasn't worn his boots and the sneakers got soaked.

Once he is in his apartment, Matt sets the calibrator on his couch. Then he takes a beer out of the fridge, picks up the latest Physical Review Letters and carries them into the bathroom. He runs a few inches of hot water into the tub, takes off his sneakers, and puts his feet in to soak.

While Matt is thawing out, drinking the beer and reading the journal, his mother calls him and fusses about his bathroom phone. Matt tells her an edited version of his activities, but leaves out all mention of the time machine and his breakup with Kara.

After hanging up the phone, someone knocks on his door. Before he can finish wiping his feet, the door is opened from the outside to let in Kara. She has come to pick up a forgotten item. She does comment about his clean feet prior to giving him the key and walking out to her ride.

This story shows Matt learning how to use the calibrator to transport himself into the future. It also shows him getting into more and more trouble as he travels uptime. His boss reasons out how the device works as a time machine, but Matt only finds out why the device works in the far future.

Matt really doesn't like the future very much and wants to return to his home time. So the tale is basically a quest for knowledge about controlling the device. The time machine itself is not very original, although the terminology used in the story may have some relation to reality (see the Author's Note). So the gist of the story is Matt's relationships with other people; initially very poor, but improving in time.

Recommended for Haldeman fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of time travel, strange futures, and human relationships.

-Arthur W. Jordin

Three and a half stars, I'd say.

As the title suggests, The Accidental Time Machine is a time-travel story. It follows the adventures of Matt, a physics graduate assistant at MIT who builds an innocuous piece of equipment that (guess what?) accidentally works as a time machine. The machine, however, is limited. It can only move forward in time, and each time it does, the length of the jump increases by approximately a factor of 12: the first jump lasts a little over a second, the next 15 seconds, then three minutes, half an hour, and before long, decades and millennia. Moreover, the machine is a fluke. No one knows how it works, or how to duplicate it.

Matt at first tries to figure out the machine on his own, but eventually uses it to escape into the future. Each stop is fairly brief, no more than a few days, just long enough for Matt to feel threatened and move on. He keeps moving forward, hoping to reach a time when backwards time travel is possible so he can return home.

Time travel is a familiar road, and it's hard to be completely original. Matt's first stops are reminiscent of H. G. Wells' classic novel. He even picks up his own Weena: Martha, a religious innocent who becomes his travel companion. As the jumps stretch farther into the future, the story more resembles Vernor Vinge's Realtime. Humans have, for the most part, moved on, and the world seems an empty place.

Haldeman's intent is different than Wells or Vinge, however. The tone is much lighter, often humorous, the pace quicker, the danger less threatening. Matt doesn't seem too perturbed by his situation, or overly curious about the changes around him. He just continues his plucky way forward. We get just a taste of the future at each stop, like sightseers on a tour bus. I would have liked more. And Haldeman doesn't delve too deeply into the physics or paradoxes of time travel, just enough to keep the story moving.

The verdict? The Accidental Time Machine is fine, a pleasant story that is entertaining enough. It is a quick read, only 270 pages of well-spaced print. It's not Haldeman's best work, and it's not Hugo caliber, but it is enjoyable. Mostly Harmless, as Douglas Adams would say. It's probably not worth hardback prices, though; wait for the paperback.

You can always count on Haldemen to write a good story. Some are really really good (like Forever War) but The Accidental Time Machine was just good. A rather short read, not too inventive for the genre (time travel) but it was interesting and well written. I tend to like hard science fiction and this one was not overly hard (but it was interesting to look up M-Theory and learn a little more about "branes"). I wish it was a little longer and a little more complicated, but it was a joy to read.

I have read very few science fiction novels, preferring short fiction or non-fiction, but I can't resist time travel reading! This book was much better than I had even hoped. Mostly by accident, Matt gets control of a strange time machine---every time you use it, it takes you further into the future and further away from where it was first used. He jumps into the future many times, finding many types of societies and conditions on Earth, and along the way finds romance too. The ending made me so happy---I love ending that really tell what happened next! I do admit there were strange characters and perhaps some plot oddities, but I still give this book five stars because these didn't bother me at all---I loved reading the book, felt eager to hear what happened next and have a fairly light knowledge of physics, so mistakes in that area wouldn't bother me! I would recommend the book to any lover of time travel reading.

An interesting quick read, but ultimately disappointing. Character development sputters out after a briefly interesting start. The story is fast paced, but appears to lose its way half way through.

The Deus-ex-machina ending is completely unsatisfying and leaves more questions than it answers - why is backwards time travel suddenly an option? What happens to the paradoxical time loops mentioned earlier? Where do these all-powerful beings come from?

If you are interested in great SF, try Haldeman's "All My Sins Remembered" which is less well known than "The Forever War", but orders of magnitude better than this book.

All My Sins Remembered
The Forever War

While reading this book I began to wonder whether Joe had planned this to be a 'young adult' novella? There are enough blank pages in this book to write another novel, and the printing and spacing is such to maximize the size of the novel. The story itself is nothing new and in many cases reads like H.G.Wells' or one of his contemporaries.

The science is plausible but gets bogged down in technospeak to the point it is incomprehensible to the other characters. Sadly, Joe even writes a postscript to pat himself on the back for his use of 'gravitons' for the basis of his time travel because some scientists have published a paper that uses this as a basis for time-travel (woo hoo!). Though he explains the reason for the exponential time dilation (like that!), the "grey time" between jumps, never increases after the third jump, as if Joe forgot about that part of the equation. Granted that increasing the grey time would have ended the ability to time travel, there has to be a symmetry to the science.

The story that follows the last couple of time jumps is so childish to be a parody of itself. Turning the AI 'La' into an evil cousin of 'HAL' was about as lame an idea that I could imagine, and that the "couple" in the book are sent 'back to the future' of an earlier time (by some descendants of theirs) is way too hokey.

Poor job by a well thought of author, better you should read "Forever War".

Always a huge fan of time travel/alternate universe stories, I was bound to pick up Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine at some point. Believing it would be a lighthearted look at time travel, I was a bit surprised by how far my expectations were off, and how disappointing the book was.

Matt is a lab assistant at MIT in the near future who accidentally creates a time machine when building some sort of graviton spectrometer. Finding that the machine jumps forward and only forward in time in progressively longer interims, Matt decides to hop aboard himself and check it out. Feeling threatened at future stops, he continues to fling himself forward ever farther in time. Eventually, about 200 years after the story begins, he winds up in a sort of post-apocalyptic theocracy where he meets Martha, the obligatory eventual love interest. As they jumps take him father and farther ahead in time, the different earths he explores are fairly boring. For what is a short novel, it would have been nicer to get more a sense of these worlds before leaping to the next.

The theocracy I described takes place after the second coming of Jesus, and there are religious themes throughout the book. Unfortunately, the religious angle isn't played up enough for my tastes, and the evolution of Martha's character is fairly unbelievable when one considers that she has grown up in a sheltered world full of old time religion.

Haldeman relies on the standard third person narration here, but with the entire novel being told from matt's perspective, I wonder why he didn't go the first person route. I think the humor would have worked better, and it just might have made things more exciting to experience them through his eyes rather than just being told through the narration. Perhaps this is just an inherent bias with me; I tend to prefer first person narration above all others.

Matt really wants to return home, so the basic quest is the search for a time machine that allows one to travel back in time. He keeps jumping to the future in order to find someone who can help him build one of it doesn't exist already, and when he finally does discover a way back no real explanation besides `you don't have the worldview to begin to understand the math' is given. I'm not some big tech head who has to know how everything works, but why write a book about time travel and go light on the mechanics?

All in all, a fair book that was more entertaining than not. The Accidental Time Machine isn't up to the standards set by Haldeman's The Forever War, not even close. But it was nice to read a little more of one of the most respected SF writers. I may have to go with a more traditional military SF novel by him sometime next year.