Customer Reviews

Time Travelers Never Die

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Michael Shelbourne is a physicist with broad interests in history and literature. We never learn how he comes into possession of three iPod-like "converters" that allow their owners to travel through time, although he presumably had a hand in inventing them. When Michael disappears, the converters fall into the hands of his son Shel and his multilingual friend Dave. After some initial fumbling to learn the tricks of time travel, the two are off into the past. Their initial goal is to find Shel's father, but the agenda expands to include historical sight-seeing, rescue of lost manuscripts, and lucrative art investing. Big fun!

The story has interesting strengths. No time is wasted with pages of invented pseudoscience justifying time travel technology. Technical concerns are limited to keeping the hand-held time machines charged and dry. There is a constraint that each converter can only transport one person--and there are only three of them. (Actually, with time-hopping and fast-fingered borrowing, there can sometimes be more than three.) This leads to situations where one time traveler gets in trouble and another has to get him out. They range from the mundane "my converter is out of juice" through several varieties of converter theft and loss to more complex scenarios where a time jump might create a paradox.

And there are weaknesses. Big ones, unfortunately. The main characters are disappointingly shallow. Shel and Dave have a few moving experiences, such as attending the Selma civil rights march and spending an evening with Ben Franklin's discussion group. These are exceptions. They more often hop into an historical event, watch the highlights, snap a few pictures, and push the big, black go-home button. Much of their onsite behavior is almost comically out-of-touch. They introduce themselves with their real names, shake hands with everybody, and even get to know some historical figures by "taking them to lunch." Nobody seems to think this strange.

The shallowness extends to the plot. Too many promising subplots never lift off. We see many of Dave's romantic troubles without seeing how they resolve. Lost Greek plays are released into modern times, but we learn little about the public's reaction. Long-time Jack McDevitt fans--and I count myself one--often divide his work into two groups. There are cleverly-written, big-idea stories like A Talent For War and The Engines of God that engage readers in solving a mystery, either scientific or historic. And there are a few directionless meanders like Eternity Road that just don't go anywhere. I must regrettably place Time Travelers Never Die in the second category. It is a tapestry loosely weaved, with many stray threads.

That said, Jack McDevitt fans should read this book and will enjoy it. First-timers should first read one of his stronger works. And both types of reader should contrast this book with David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself to see how a concept-driven time travel story can be done well.

Well, the title of my review and one star rating pretty much tells how much I liked the book. What was wrong with it? Almost everything. I am a fan of Jack McDevitt's Priscilla Hutchins ("The Academy Novels") space operas. They were exciting, contained good "hard" science fiction, and were greatly enhanced and made more believable by the military verisimilitude deriving from McDevitt's military and tactical background.

"Time Travelers Never Die" has none of this. There is no science in the fiction. The time machines are little portable devices invented by Shel's [the principal protagonist] father who has gone missing in time but there is no attempt at even the briefest explanation of how they work, how they were invented etc. And when one of them all of a sudden stops working, the inventor father is completely unable to even attempt a diagnosis or repair. Oh really? This is compounded by totally flat characters, no action, nothing original, nada. Just an endless travelogue of two buddies looking through time for Shel's dad. And the travelogue is totally sterile - barren of any local flavor or culture. Every place is like every other place - only the names have changed. There is nothing to distinguish Shakespeare's 16 century England from the Alexandria of 149 B.C. In several places from the Library of Alexandria through the Revolutionary war our heroes show several 21st century photographs of Shel's father, as well as a modern digital camera and cell phone to some extremely well-known and intelligent historical figures. Our ancestors don't seem to have any problem with lame explanations as to what these artifacts are or how they come to be in existence. Talk about suspension of disbelief! I was literally laughing out loud.

There are other huge holes in the plot and logic structure of the novel (e.g., Dad gets stuck in time but doesn't think to leave a note, sign or other artifact that his son would be sure to find in the present explaining his absence - see "Timeline") and in the behavior of the two main characters. Their choices of places and times to visit (and omissions of such) boggles the mind I guess Golgotha around 33 A.D. was too mundane. After all who cares if there really was a Jesus and/or if he was really the son of God etc. But a Babe Ruth baseball game was really important. Who built the pyramids and how, why and when? What happened to the Mayans? And so on. Our two heroes were much more interested in visiting with late Renaissance European artists, poets and the like, but nothing of interest or substance emerges.

I found the entire book boring and pointless, and, as I said in the review title, I think this was the most boring time travel story I have ever read. I am not usually so harsh in my reviews but there was really nothing to recommend here at all. My advice if you're looking for time travel/historical fiction is to read "Guns of the South" by Turtledove, Crichton's "Timeline" and/or Baxter's "The Time Ships" and give McDevitt's latest a big pass.


JM Tepper

Being a big fan of time travel stories I had high hopes for this novel. While quite readable, I think it felt like an OK short story idea that had been padded out a bit too far. Time travel seems a little too easy and the characters meet a new famous person every page or so on average (seriously) and any there is no real tension or sense of danger. Definitely not up to the standards of McDevitt's other works.

I admit it. I'm a sucker for time travel stories. I read Heinlein's The Door Into Summer when I was a teenager, Time After Time and The Guns of the South in my 20's and when I run across a time travel novel I'm usually an easy mark for it. So, Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt seemed an interesting title so I went for it.

With a title like Time Travelers Never Die, of course, the first thing the author is going to do is open the book with a funeral. The funeral is for Michael Shelborne who is a gifted physicist who mysteriously disappears. After the funeral his son Adrian Shelborne, also a physicist but a much less gifted one than his father, receives a letter from his father's attorney which puts him in possession of two Q-pods that seem to be akin to MP3 players. Adrian soon discovers the Q-pods to be time machines. Shel, as Adrian is known as, quickly decides that his father didn't die but went into the past and something happened to him there and he was unable to return. He enlists his friend Dave and they go into the past to find Shel's father.

Soon the urgency to find Shel's father dissipates quickly after they fail to find him in a crowd but they rationalize "they have all the time in the world," and Shel and Dave are off on their time travels. The main conceit of the novel, to rescue Shel's father is relegated to sub-plot status. Their time travel adventures seem like very facile time travelogues with them visiting the library at Alexandria and taking pictures with their cell phones of the lost plays of Sophocles. Which they bring them back and give them anonymously to a colleague of Dave's in a subplot that is dropped without a real resolution. The travels themselves are very brief. We're never given a real sense of the time or the people Shel and Dave visit. They're more like a montage of history, or maybe Cliff`s Notes of time travelers.

Of course when you time travel you have to watch out for paradoxes. There does seem to be a penalty for creating a paradox, a heart attack. Shel ends up one time in the ocean due to the possibility of a paradox. But after Shel is dumped in the ocean, early on, it's never established whether there is a self-correcting force in the universe that abhors paradoxes. Shel and Dave seem endlessly able to travel create paradoxes and don't seem to suffer any consequences.

Although, with these reservations this is a highly readable book. It just maybe McDevitt's style flows nicely and carries you along with the story. I've read other reviews and this novel had its genesis in a short story and that the novel is padded out. It doesn't feel padded out to me. More like McDevitt thought of some really cool things to see and do in the past and he added them, but didn't really tie them in with anything and they didn't add to a satisfying resolution.

I am a huge Jack McDevitt fan. I am generally waiting with bated breath for his next book to come out. So when Time Travelers Never Die auto-downloaded into my Kindle right before a flight to Australia, I was ecstatic. To date, Jack's creative, exciting, and fantanstical work had never disappointed.

To date that was.

Time Travelers Never Die is just about as boring as it gets. Unless you are a big history buff, it's hard to stay awake for this snoozer. There are huge long passages of the main characters rambling on and on with historical figures about things that do not further the plot line at all. Half way through the book I just started skimming through those passages. I actually stopped reading the book out of lack of interest about 2/3rds of the way through. I did eventually go back and finish it just in case it was one of those really slow to get to the good parts kind of books. I needn't have bothered.

The characters are flat and I never did get to the point where I cared if they lived or died. The whole timeline paradox thing had the potential to be interesting, but really just started to become annoying. It would have been really interesting to find out who or what was controlling the "death to those who mess with the timeline" principle but it was never addressed. Curiously, it didn't even seem like the characters were curious about it themselves.

As I said at the beginning, Jack McDevitt is a wonderful author. And I'm back to waiting with bated breath for his next book. But if you're just starting to get to know this author, please do yourself a tremendous favor and go back to the mid-1990's and read forward. You'll be enthralled and have a blast reading your way forward all the way to The Devil's Eye. But if you start with this sleeper, you'll probably lose interest in Jack McDevitt.

And that would be a sad, sad thing indeed.

I usually like Jack McDevitt's novels (esp. the Academy series), but 'Time Travelers Never Die' (TTND) left me disappointed.

The plot was OK, but hardly innovative or complicated. And the physics of time travel were pretty much ignored - that's classic McDevitt by the way, the story is a framework for character interactions, but in this case those characters felt sketched out rather than flesh and blood. Which meant that the plot had to carry more than its load rating and aspects such as temporal censorship or the inconsistent planning for various incursions into the past never made much sense.

Plus, the writing style seemed to be along the lines of "he did", "he said", "he saw", rather than drawing us into the immersive emotions and motivations that I've come to expect from McDevitt. Even the philosophic reflections of the two protagonists seemed stilted and the forays into the past felt like a sideline filler rather than intrinsic to telling the story.

And something that flitted in and out as I read TTND was the complete lack of interest by any of the time travelling characters to explore the life of Jesus. Come on, seriously? Even the most agnostic of us is going to be curious enough to punch in 'DATE: Crucifixion' and confirm or deny their own belief system. There wasn't even a conversation about it and a decision to leave well enough alone, it was just absent.

Anyway, I read TTND immediately after a McDevitt Academy novel, 'Cauldron', and perhaps that was my downfall because the different styles very evident and TTND came off second best. Indeed, it felt like a short story fleshed out - or one written to spec, rather than flowing from the pen.

So, not one of his better books in my view.

I really enjoy reading Jack McDevitt's books, but ... this one was really a light parfait instead of a rack of lamb, if you get my metaphor.

And don't read any farther if you don't want spoilers.

I mean, these time machines come out of nowhere - no explanation for how they exist - characters are able to violate the rules of time (which McDevitt set up), characters pick up ancient languages in days/weeks, etc. But it's lightly entertaining and highly readable, as all of McDevitt's books are. No, you don't really feel that the characters are really visiting another time - there's no texture to the canvas, no real juicy details, no smells or sounds that would really make you say 'wow, he really captured this period in time.'

So, I just don't buy it. But ... I did 'buy' it and read it and felt like I'd eaten an attractive meal and was still famished at the end.

I'm a big fan of McDevitt and find it hard to not rate him highly in his choice of subject matter. However, I found this book not to my liking. I wish he would stay with the 'stars', the story was at times convulated and had some obvious areas that could have stood some explanation. The characters did not seem real and were almost unbelievable as friends. I'm dissapointed by this book and although I read it all the way through I think I'll stick with 'Hutch' and the stars from now on.

It started very nice, with a mystery, the characters are nice, not very extraordinary - believable. So far so god.
But then after a short while the story just disappears. Its solved, and the book looses the line.
It's just all about an endless chain of traveling to some arbitrary events (though well known) events in history, fantasizing about them. There come some troubles with loosing or breaking one of the time machines developing small micro stories how this can be solved with repeatedly jumping back and forth is time, but that's it.
Sorry, waste of time.
M.

In my mind Jack McDevitt seems to be the logical successor to Isaac Asimov; his books have consistently captivated my imagination with exciting plots and interesting characters. In spite of this book I still have high hopes for his future novels!

This book has neither an exciting plot nor interesting characters; I was surprised and disappointed but I stuck it out and finished the book. It's almost as if he didn't really know what to do with his storyline and tried experimenting with several alternatives, none of which worked successfully; some sections were particularly painful and preachy.

McDevitt has written many really good science fiction novels all of which I have enjoyed, most of them many times. This one was really off on a tangent and did not ever really come together for me. I kept hoping the next chapter would display the writer I respect so highly, but it never came.

I would not be sorry if he put this series behind him and got back to what he does best. Do not buy this book expecting classic Jack McDevitt; it represents a departure from his usual style and fails as an experiment.