Customer Reviews

Timemaster

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This reviewer has noted time and time again, that Dr. Forward's novels excel in "hard science" but not so much in depth of character or development of plot. In "Timemaster" we still have the outstanding science -- with enough of an improvement in character and plot to satisfy most Sci-Fi fans.

When dealing with his "neg matter" plants -- and the opportunities such creatures would provide for relatively intstaneous space and time travel, Forward continues to fill his books with life forms radically different from anything we have (or can really imagine) on Earth -- and make them believable.

This one is a good read. I highly recommend it.

I have read several of Dr. Forward's books, and this is, by far, my favorite---I read it twice and am considering a third reading. Dr. Forward writes "hard" science fiction, and Timemaster is no exception, sticking closely with the known laws of physics. The concepts presented in this book are intriguing and Mr. Hunter's solution to the problem of his nemesis in a delightful surprise. Highly recommended!

Reading Robert Forward's books is just plain fun. Forward takes an idea and develops the hell out of it and does everything you'd want to see done plus a few things you haven't thought of. In Timemaster the key discovery is that of negmatter. The ramifications of that discovery for one very lucky entrepreneur are explored. A high velocity space drive, wormholes and time machines fall out this one discovery and Forward explores them all, within the frameworks of a somewhat juvenile plot. It is the ideas and exploration that drive this story, and I read it with a delight that I can only remember from my days of reading Campbell-era SF when stories weren't so dystopian and serious.

If you like hard, idea-driven SF, you don't want to miss this one.

I like most of Forward's books. To this day, I'll often bring Dragon's Egg and Roche World down from the shelves to give them another glance or two.

Sadly, this is the least of his work. The protagonist is a shallow bit of more-than-obvious wish fulfillment. This is a character that starts off by saying that his goal is to become the wealthiest person in the universe and to live forever. Mind you, this is a person who already starts out as a billionaire, so we're not exactly talking about some sort of Heinleinian competent man who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. This is a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth who's only ambition is to replace it with a platinum one.

This is compounded by the fact that the central plot device that drives him towards his mastery of space and time (seriously, these descriptions of him are actual chapter headings!) is the accidental discovery of an alien life form that excretes matter with negative mass.

The book is best when Forward takes time to consider the implications of negative mass, although I'm hesitant to call it hard science-fiction given that Forward is basically postulating a blatant violation of known physics and then methodically working his way through what such a violation would imply. It's a clever sort of logical game, but it veers away from his normal standard of sticking with known and reasonably extrapolations of physics and taking them to their logical conclusions.

Along the way, we get swipes at all sorts of things that we can infer that Forward hates, including and especially (remarkably enough) animal rights activism. His antagonists are nothing than a bunch of bleating straw men whose only function is to be repeatedly knocked down by the neigh god-like hero of the story.

The overall effect is a story that seems petty, self-indulgent with a weak-as-water plot.

As I said, Forward has written some remarkable stories, but this is not one of them. Every author has a worst book and this one is it.

The "hero" of the book acts and sounds like a 10 year old brat. The author might have a PhD in Physics but couldn't seem to come up with something that was readable. 58 pages and "that's all folks".

July 17 2010 - I was desperate for something th read and had forgotten I'd read part before so I read this all the way through. Some interesting ideas - but still only 2 stars.

So here we have domesticated Aliens made of exotic negative matter
being the basis of interstellar travel. Throw in information transfer from the future and a really bad guy and you have adventure through space and time. This book is better than a lot of Forward's work as he
doesn't try to tie up all the scientific ends in an Einsteinian way. It is more like a Campbell romp or an Heinlein adventure story.
I enjoyed it and couldn't put it down which I can't say about the last Forward book I read.

Space entrepeneur Randy Hunter discovers a kind of space-dwelling plant composed of negative matter, which allows him to develop interstellar spaceflight and time travel, not to mention acheiving all of his dreams, winning the girl, foiling his drug-addicted rival, and becoming an all-around great guy. ... Author Robert L. Forward never lets us forget how wonderful and brilliant he thinks his hero is, which came off as more than a little self-congratulatory since I couldn't shake the feeling that he was meant to serve as an alter-ego for Forward himself. There is much juvenile one-upmanship between Randy and his cartoonish arch-rival, Oscar, who is just as bad as Randy is good and whose dislike is never explained as anything more than jealousy (but then, who wouldn't be jealous of such a terrific guy as Randy). I found the key plot device of the Silverhairs to be ludicrous and uninteresting. The sole saving grace of this book is some fascinating business toward the end concerning time travel and the interaction between the Randys of various time periods. Had this aspect of the story been more prominent, it would have been a better book, but instead it is buried among juvenile characterizations and dull plotting.

From start to end an imagantive and well written sci-fi story of future science that seems like magic today. This story uses many ideas in Rob's book 'Future Magic' and demonstrates them very well. I finished this book in a couple of days - a really gripping plot with a great open end - or was it the start!?

I'm a fan of sci-fi books, having read everything from Asimov to Zelany. I was hopefully this would be a good book considing what others have said about it. To put it bluntly, this book stinks.

The hero is absolutely perfect, achieves everything and wins the girl. This may be an acceptable character to a target audience of 12 yr olds (see Johnny Quest or Asimov's Lucky Starr series) but just proves annoying to anyone beyond a middle school level education. Every other character proves to be just as badly developed as this. The science may be real and plausible but nothing else about this book is.

Billed as the "definitive" book on time travel, Timemaster disappoints on so many levels it's pointless to list them. The most obvious criticism: How could a mind that understands the workings of physics miss the workings of culture and society? Clearly, Mr. Forward harkens from the "Greatest Generation" whose heroes were John Wayne, Errol Flynn and other, now mostly forgotten, larger-than-life examples of manhood in, say, the nineteen fifties. Did he not realize that people would move on and change in almost every way by 2036 - 2050?
This book feels like it was written by Ayn Rand! The slagging of animal rights activists and the worship of wealth and over-consumption completely ruined what was left of the plot for me. Normally, I don't drag my personal beliefs into a book...but this was simply way too much. I think this book was written by Forward in 1952 and sent, ahem, forward, to 1992 just to upset the more progressive SF readers! :-)