Joe Haldeman’s The Accidental Time Machine is kind of an updated version of H. G. Wells The Time Machine with plotting reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero. I generally liked it except for the deux ex machina ending which stole what little of the main character’s agency that existed. It’s a pretty good ride until the story gets there though.
Matt Fuller is a schlubby lab assistant at M.I.T. He’s stopped work on his more or less scientifically pointless dissertation and settled into a non-academic track of lab work, uppers, and well, not a whole lot else. His girlfriend Kara has just left him at the start of the story. He’s depressed. He’s been working 30+ hours straight. And when he pushes the reset button on the calibrator he’s just built for his boss it disappears and then re-appears. It does so a couple of times, for longer periods each time.
Thinking he’s seeing things, our hero Matt takes the device home and plays with it. He figures out what’s happening is that the machine is a time machine. Not the really interesting kind that can take you forward and back in time. His can only go forward, and only in ever increasing time increments. (Haldeman kept using the term linear, but I think he meant quadratic or polynomial or exponential. Maybe I’ve forgotten my terms though.) He sends a turtle to the future just to see what happens.
After getting fired, he decides to go to the future himself. First jump a few weeks. Second jump a few years. Each future in which he arrives inevitably is inhospitable to Matt in one way or another. And then he just has to keep pushing the button until he gets to a future where someone has invented a reverse time machine to get him home. Tau Zero had the same general out of control fast-forwarding feeling. And both inexorably push the characters toward the end of time, though in different ways.
Matt is suitably non-offensive and likable enough to propel the plot. However, every time I thought about him beyond the surface I recoiled a little bit. He’s schlubby, the classic nice guy
who isn’t. Early on in the story he gets a little bit of spunk in him, going his own way to experiment with the time machine. But after the first couple of pushes, other actors and events more or less take hold of whether Matt goes to the future or not. Someone has to save him, as he can’t do it himself. Haldeman drops Titanic-sized hints about how this will end.
Some of the timelines are fairly interesting. So much so that I wished Matt didn’t have to push the button to get to the next one. I wanted to know more about many of these possible futures. I guess that’s one of the beauties of this kind of story; Haldeman can indulge himself in creating a number of futures but doesn’t have to write in excruciating detail about how each of them got to be that way.
Another thing that bothered me a bit is the complaint about stories of the future that don’t include anyone but white people. This one doesn’t. And I might even have not noticed (because that’s not normally one of my hot-button issues), but Haldeman’s text has Matt questioning what happened to all the blacks in Boston in one future. So now it’s on my radar, but the reason is never explain. And now I’m noticing there are no blacks or other minorities in other futures as well. I don’t want to make the author wrong for not portraying black characters, but calling it out yourself and then don’t follow through. That’s at least one demerit.
Pretty good plot, decent characters when they get the opportunity, but under the surface the book didn’t have a lot of depth to it for me. In other words, it’s nice science fiction brain candy.
Other blogged reviews:
- Space Time Stories
- Mike Brotherton
- Becky’s Book Reviews
- Thinking About Books
- Giraffe Days Book Reviews
Title: The Accidental Time Machine
Author: Joe Haldeman
Cover creator: Annette Fiore DeFex (designer) / Craig White (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Ace / Penguin
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 260 p.
Publication date: August 2008 (originally August 2007)
ISBN-13: 978-0-441-01616-7
Subject: Time travel — Fiction
Subject: Science fiction
LC classification: PS3558.A353 A65 2007
I’ve read all of Joe Haldeman’s books trying to figure out why he’s so popular, and the answer has not presented itself to me yet! This one impressed me even less than some of the others!