The Accidental Time Machine
by Joe Haldeman
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Book Reviews of The Accidental Time Machine
Book Review: Haldeman's Accidental...
Summary: 3 Stars
Time travel is a palpable fantasy for us. Joe Haldeman is one of the first masters of the post pulp generation of science fiction writers, and the generation that influenced the newer one like Neil Gaiman. Mr. Haldeman has been writing since 1970, had his first book published in `72 and his breakthrough novel The Forever War published in `75. And in his hands The Accidental Time Machine, the story of Matt Fuller an average graduate student who is destined NOT to make a great breakthough discovery that will garner him a Noble prize, until, he accidentally invents a time machine that takes us on a fast moving adventures into the future. Where, at first, the futures presented to him have a ring of familiarity but the farther he goes into the future do those futures become ever more alien to him. Haldeman gives us a rather interesting trip to the future that holds our interest with interesting set-ups of the future and some possible effects to bend our minds around.
There are two ways for time travel novels to go into the future like H.G. Wells seminal The Time Machine, or into the past because we all realize that we're all already time travelers, it's a one way trip to the future with no return ticket. So, we're looking for that time machine, back to the past, a little nostalgia for a period we consider a simpler more uncomplicated times such as Joe Finney`s Time and Again, or Back to the Future. In this fantasy we can rewrite our lives going back in time, we would know all the answers, know when the great inventions are going to be discovered, invest in Microsoft, give Henry Ford the loan to start his car company, know where to find the oil wells, the outcomes of the World Series, which stocks to buy, replace Thomas Edison or Leonardo DaVinci, or we can go back to be heroes of history, warn Lincoln about Ford's Theater. But if you're going to go back in time and start doing these things you're going to provoke a lot of paradoxes, going back to meet yourself, be your own grandfather, keep your brother and sister from being erased from the face of existence, the genre demands these paradoxes be resolved.
The greater challenge to the writer is of course to go into the future knowing your reader won't have comfortable position of a nostalgic return or knowing how events will unfold. It can also free the writer up to show worlds that might be without the reader being able to object to it, and hopefully they will be held in thrall to the visions of the future. In The Accidental Time Machine I think Haldeman greatly succeeds in presenting those ever increasingly alien futures. Where I think a couple of shortcomings of the novel come into play is a future that Haldeman obviously wanted to explore. Matt finds himself in a future where the Second Coming of Jesus has occurred, and the world is run by a strict theocracy backed by Jesus. When I was reading this I felt very much that we were into the meat of the novel, perhaps the reason Haldeman wrote it, was this really Jesus? Was it the real Second Coming? But just as Matt is about to confront "Jesus," Haldeman has Matt escape the confrontation by having Matt press the button to the future, sending Matt into ever increasing episodic futures as Matt starts pushing the button more and more often in order to find a future that will be able to send him back to where he started and sending the novel into the realm of escapist fantasy instead of something a little more hard hitting and satisfying.
One shared trait of both the nostalgic time trip and the future trip is that both generate paradoxes that need to be resolved, such as finding a way to keep your brother and sister from being erased from time, or in Haldeman's case to find a way for Matt Fuller to be able to come back in time in order to provide a million dollars in bail money for himself after he's accused of murdering someone who died after witnessing Matt disappear into the future. Matt believes that's what happened and we even see how Haldeman, in one of Matt's futures starts to build toward the resolution of this paradox by having Matt by virtue of a time jump, have in his possession antique items that he's able to sell for huge sums of money in one of the futures. But Haldeman quickly backs off this and we're sent into futures that start flying by rather quickly for no other obvious reason except to push it a rather fast and unsatisfying resolution especially after the journey we've just taken with the author. Interestingly enough the novel ends where Joe Haldeman begins.
Book Review: maybe he takes lessons from Michael Crichton
Summary: 2 Stars
Of all the plot devices in the history of literature, it may be, it just may be, that having advanced time travelers choosing to make contact with an atheist non-practicing Jew by assuming the form of Jesus, is the stupidest one ever conceived. I was worried for a while that this would turn into a piece of religious crud on the level of Left Behind, but fortunately at least he turned out to not actually be Jesus, speaking to them across the depths of time and space, but indeed an advanced time traveler.
This book also employs my absolute most detested type of ending (spoiler warning - skip the rest of this paragraph if you actually want to read this book after reading my words of disgust). The "happily ever after with too much information" ending, I'd have to call it. The "and they all lived happily ever after until they all got old and they all died of old age" ending. Fictional characters are innately more pure than real people, so you don't need to go contaminating them with eventualities of the real thing. Any good ending to a book like this either has the heroes die bravely and honorably in the act of saving the universe, or is left setting up a sequel. It doesn't matter if a sequel never actually comes, but it should always be SET UP for a sequel as if it was going to come. This sucker did the worst possible thing. It killed off the characters in the worst way, AND it left loose ends. What was all that about his earlier self coming back to the 2050s to bail himself out with the million dollars and the instructions to "get in the car and go"? What, did his self in 1969 leave instructions in his will that someone who kind of looks like he did when he was young would give the million dollars to the law firm at such and such time and place with such and such instructions? Who would be appointed for this role, since they wouldn't know until he was the right age and the time to do it was near, what this appointed person would look like? That was the WHOLE REASON for his believing that he would eventually find a way to make it back to the past. That was the whole reason for him continuing to go forward. That was the whole reason for the story progressing. That's a pretty big loose end if you ask me!
So like I said in the title of this review, this is the sort of thing Michael Crichton might have come up with. A fantastically thought-provoking and exciting premise, but the devil's in the details; everything after the initial set-up is a disappointment that could just as well have been arbitrarily created by a child, especially the ending. Just like them giving up the power and that sphere taking off in Sphere....
Add to that some things I'd rather not read in my science fiction, thank you very much (Some things that would NEVER appear in golden-age sci-fi for instance, and is unfortunately becoming increasingly popular as standards slide from Victorian to acceptable to total trash. Is "Joe" Haldeman really a man or is this one of those cases where a woman uses a pen-name - like Andre Norton - so that people will take her more seriously? Andre Norton at least played the part well. I can certainly imagine lonely housewives would go for this book, and "go" for the main character especially), and we have a loser that's inappropriate for children and too annoying for most adults. Or it least it should be too annoying for most adults. But considering what's on television, I maybe shouldn't overestimate how discerning most adults are.
Book Review: Mildly Entertaining, but little depth
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Book Review: Undercooked time travel novel
Summary: 2 Stars
The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman.
Coincidentally, I was recently talking about a Poul Anderson short story, "Flight to Forever", which has some resemblance to this novel.
The basic premise is similar with some twists. Matt, a grad student at MIT, accidental invents the eponymous time machine. Its only a one way device, and the "jumps" are logarithmically longer and longer, and so his journey quickly becomes a one way trip to the future, looking for a way to reverse the process and return to his own time.
Along the way, he discovers strange cultures, picks up a passenger, and finally manages to return to the past, but not in the way or manner that he expects.
So on the basics, its pretty similar to the story mentioned above. The concept as Haldeman executes it, though is a little more polished in the physics. Anderson's story was really a device for sending his protagonist through time. Haldeman takes some things into consideration that Anderson doesn't--for example the idea that the time machine's "landing location" might change through time thanks to the motion of celestial bodies.
Like Anderson's story, we wind up with some strange future societies that Matt and his inadvertent fellow passenger whom he picks up encounter. A religious theocracy, a society which seems to be Ebay writ large, and a post-Singularity beings are among the challenges that Matt faces as he jumps through time.
The novel is short, and aside from the religious theocracy and Matt's present (in the mid 21st century), we never really spend a lot of time getting to the nuts and bolts of the worlds. Haldeman could have spent endless pages on each of these stops, and in some cases, I would have liked to learn a little more about Matt's stops. Also, the ending is, frankly, a deus ex machina in an almost literal sense. There are also aspects to the narrative (the idea that there are multiple timelines, or multiple versions of Matt being sent back) that are mentioned in a few sentences and never really explored fully. Also, the explanation of just how the accidental time machine really worked is very much glossed over.
So I have to say that I was disappointed in the novel overall, which unfortunately (after Forever Peace) means that I've now read two novels by Haldeman that I don't like in comparison to one (Forever War). I suppose that he is going to now drop off on the list of authors that I will read, sad to say. The Accidental Time Machine is not a *bad* novel, but its, to use culinary terminology, definitely a little undercooked and the flavors didn't meld well. It was a disappointment.
Book Review: I wonder if the book was even written by Joe Haldeman
Summary: 2 Stars
I wonder if the book was even written by Joe Haldeman. Sorry Joe but I can not even say that the book was worth the time I gave it. I wish I had a time machine to go back and get the time I wasted reading this book. Yet I would recommend anyone read Joe Haldeman.
I don't need all the ends tied up, but to introduce a character like future Matt in the being of the book and never discover or even meet him was wrong.
The key to any book is whither you like the character? Matt made no sense to me. He never questions who put up the Million Dollars bond money or where the number 1,000,000.00 came from and just assumes it was a future Matt? He does not question the note to get in the car and jump again. I don't understand what his reasons where for jumping except that he assumes future Matt was the person that jumped back and put up the money as well as left him the note to jump. Yet we never does find out which future Matt did tell our story Matt that he needs to jump. Even the reason Matt does jumped again is not clear except to think that he has to in order for him to be the future Matt which comes back and saves him. Which again is strange because our Matt doesn't seem to be in any real danger to speak of except that the note tells him to do it. It just had lots and lots of unanswered questions, which would have been great if there had been a second book. We are lead to believe our Matt will one day be the future Matt that does figures out reverse time travel and does puts up one Million for a cash bond and write the note telling past Matt to go find the car and time jump. But it never happens? The character's actions just never made any sense to me. Do we just assume that future Matt that jumped back in time just want ahead and jumped forward after he gave past Matt the money? Did it not ever occur to him that future Matt the rich Matt wanted him to jump so that future Matt can stick around and avoid the Paradox of having two Matts in the same time plane?
Unfortunately we find that a look alike Jesus Christ is all behind it. Which is some how connected to out Matt, because should Matt our Matt not exist than our look alike JC and other will not exist. If you make any sense out of this book please email me.
Since we never did met the future Matt that did jump back and started our Matt on his journey in the end the book made no sense.
Sorry, but I do recommend you read any other of Joe Haldeman's other books.