Expiration Date is a noir-ish time travel piece of crime fiction. While it uses science fiction tropes, I don’t think it’ll appeal particularly to that fandom. The story really rides on the crime fiction rather than the science fiction.

Mickey Wade is a newly unemployed alt-weekly writer who has to move into his comatose grandfather’s apartment to make ends meet. Free rent and all. The place is located back in his old neighborhood of Frankford, Philadelphia where Mickey grew up. It’s not a pretty neighborhood, and there resides all sorts of Mickey’s ghosts. Mickey takes a couple of grandpa’s aspirin one night that turn out to be not the pills he thought they were. They transport him to the past as a ghost, where he runs into the 9 year old boy who will years later kill Mickey’s father.

The time travel trope used here is very standard. Can you go back and become your own father sort of thing. Swierczynski’s story, as plot driven as it is, relies more on its characters and relationships and a sense of place about Frankford more than it does who does what when. Time travel serves more as a device to parcel out the narrative. Mickey can only travel back in time for short periods, and he can’t precisely place himself in the past storyline, and thus the jigsaw puzzle can’t be filled in smoothly for the reader. It’s pretty artfully done.

What I really enjoyed about the story though was Mickey’s relationship with his family and his neighborhood of Frankford. Mickey both loves and misses his father, but also resents his father too. He idolized his father’s musical ability but remembers all the weekends without him because he was working gigs. In retrospect Mickey is also mad his father screwed up the possibility of a big record contract. And Mickey can’t say enough bad things about Frankford and how it’s a bad neighborhood, but he also takes pride in the fact that a serial killer stalked the area during the late 1980s.

However, as much as I enjoyed the time travel as narrative device and the relationships of the book, I am rather pissed at the book’s ending. Actually offended even. The ending turns a dirty crime novel into a Leave It To Beaver episode. For the love of god, just stop reading at the end of the second to last chapter. It’s so much better that way. I read an advance uncorrected proof. I hope to god someone came to their senses and dropped the last chapter for the real book.

Luckily, everything up to there was awesome, and the second to last chapter is a great ending for the story. I’m just going to mentally block out the last bit and call this one of the best crime fiction pieces I’ve read in ages.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Rod Lott at Bookgasm
• Pop Culture Vulture
• FNORDincorporated
• Blood of the Muse

Title: Expiration Date
Author: Duane Swierczynski
Imprint / publisher: Minotaur / Macmillan
Format: Advance reader copy
Length: 246 p.
Publication date: March 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36340-6

I received this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Review program in exchange for a review to be posted on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $11.19 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

1632 is Eric Flint’s attempt to answer/explore a scenario that has intrigued a fair number of science fiction writers and fans for years: just how well would the modern world stack up if put in the middle of older times? I’ve read a few stories along these lines over the years, though this may be the most grandiose in scale of all of them. The basic plot of these tales drops a time traveler or two in the 1880s or the U.S. War of Independence or some such period where they use a superior knowledge to amaze ancient rubes and assume an exalted place in a previous time. Flint’s version does something similar, but 1632 drops the entire town of Grantville, West Virginia in the middle of Europe’s 30 Years’ War. And while the town’s technology and know-how do amaze the locals, most are savvy enough to assimilate the newfound knowledge from the future into their lives.

Unknown to the residents of Grantville, extraterrestrial art causes an circle of land around the town to be transported to the middle of Thuringia, Germany, in 1631. Nearby soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire have just finished sacking Magdeburg, killing tens of thousands of people. Now some are attacking farmhouses in the countryside just outside the ring of fire boundary between transported United States land and rural Germany.

Inside the town, the residents see smoke from these burning houses and head out to investigate, finding men with flintlocks and sabers raping a farmgirl and torturing the farmer. Being red-blooded American members of the United Mine Workers Association (U.M.W.A.), they intervene to save them. Their superior guns allow them to prevail easily.

Quickly, Grantville decides to establish a new United States and export a modified American law to as much of the countryside as it can convince to join them. 500 pages of the story then details the political and military adventures of the new United States as it challenges the Holy Roman Empire and makes alliances with Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (already in Germany opposing the Catholic armies). In addition, Flint writes about the personal lives of some of the key residents of Grantville, both those who were transported with the ring of fire as well as some of the earliest recruits to the new nation.

The book is a very easy read. Flint includes lots of descriptions of everything: historical details, settings, action, people, and more. So you get lots and lots of information, though mostly it doesn’t feel too much like an info-dump. The pieces of information build on each other, but in a fairly sequential fashion. I didn’t have to refer pages back to integrate previous information with new revelations. The characters and their motivation are written about at the surface. Flint tells you who they are, what they look like, what they are doing, and what their motivations are. This isn’t a knock; it means that a reader can follow the story without having to read between the lines.

Flint pushes a union-left (I just made that term up, I think) version of the American psyche. Grantsville residents believe in America and the U.M.W.A. They brook no version of royalty nor elitism. Good old boy workers (mostly white) are just as capable as anyone else. They are upstanding, protecting the downtrodden and each other. Who better to bring the Bill of Rights to the peasants of central Germany?

Flint’s Grantsville has mostly moved past such things as racism. The men in charge don’t quite yet believe in women as equals, but they are open to the idea in select cases (the crack shot cheerleader, the smart Jewish refugee, the German prostitute with a steely heart). Everyone has a can-do attitude. Sometimes people disagree, but in Grantsville someone in an argument always backs off so that the disagreement can be resolved amicably, even if they still think they are right. Everyone in Grantsville has the good of the town at heart.

Flint writes in the afterword that he wrote the novel for a couple of reasons (in addition to the obvious ones). One is that he is tired of pervasive cynicism. Thus the overwhelmingly positive portrayal of Grantsville’s West Virginians and of their allies in the Thirty Years’ War, including Gustavus Adolphus. You can think, but his writing isn’t going to leave the reader with any substantially mixed messages. There are plenty of bad guys, but few of them get the privilege of having their perspective shown and none get shown as having rational reasons for what they do. Most of them get slaughtered in gory fashion. Flint also writes that he had to hold himself back from giving too many characters their just desserts. I have mixed feelings about all this, but more on that later.

The other stated reason he wrote the book agrees with my sensibilities more unambiguously. He didn’t think blue-collar workers get their due in literature today. The decision-makers in 1632 consist mostly of mine-workers, enlisted veterans of Viet Nam, teachers, and even students. While occasionally kings and generals make appearances, the scale of much of the battles described is such that captains and the like arre in charge. I think Flint is right, though I’m not sure how well anyone would really do in such a fish out of water scenario as is portrayed. You don’t become a seasoned military leader overnight, as happens in 1632.

And while I appreciate Flint’s attempt to be positive, I think that makes for an inaccurate picture. Would Americans really be so accepting of blacks and foreigners? I don’t think we’re there. Would American imperialism be so altruistic? Our history says no. And even when I accept those as given, would our can-do attitude really have such a smooth ride in a hostile environment? I’m skeptical. See, Grantsville never faces anything that even appears to actually threaten them until well after page 500. Armies of thousands? Easily dispatched. Lack of food stores for the winter? Surrounding countryside gladly supplies it. These Americans succeed like no others.

I was able to ignore my qualms for the duration of the story though. The narrative moves everything along fast and well enough that qualms can be dismissed for a time. But even if having a mixed picture of people is cynical, I think I prefer that generally speaking. Sometimes a person needs a little bit of escapism though. This version is harmless enough and fun reading.

Title: 1632
Author: Eric Flint
Cover creator: Larry Elmore
Series: The Ring of Fire; 1
Imprint / publisher: Baen
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 592 p.
Publication date: February 2008 (originally 2000)
ISBN-10: 0-671-31972-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-671-31972-4

I need to get one thing out of the way: I dislike Victorian era high society. I’m generally not going to read books set in that period if they involve the upper classes to any significant extent. For instance, I’ve never read any Jane Austen. Maybe some day. Maybe.

I had to mention that because Connie Willis sets much of her novel To Say Nothing of the Dog in that period. It’s a comedy of manners among time travelers from the future living with British society people. I liked the book, but the setting took away a chunk of my enjoyment.

Science fictionally, we’re talking time travel. There’s nothing new in Willis’ treatment of this common trope. That doesn’t take away from the story though. Rather than using the story to explore time travel, time travel is merely a device to drive the plot.

Ned Henry is a historian in the future. They can research events by traveling to the past and observing. However, the time travel net and the space time continuum prevent such visitors from changing anything. Or so everyone thinks. Henry’s normal missions are actually research for a wealthy patron of the university’s time travel department. She wants information in order to re-create a cathedral in Coventry destroyed by German bombers during World War Two. The patron is also rather overbearing.

The head of the department sends Henry back to the Victorian era for two weeks of rest away from the aforementioned overbearing patron. However, what happens there doesn’t match what history recorded, so Henry and fellow time traveling historian Verity have to maneuver events to fix things up. This includes returning a cat that was thought to be drowned, getting an ancestor of the wealthy patron to marry the right man, and figuring out what happened to a hideous fixture that at one time resided in the cathedral at Coventry.

Why I liked the book boils down to one simple aspect: the characters. I like Ned Henry and Harriet Verity Kindle, the time traveling historians. What’s obvious from when they meet is that this is their love story, but without the schmoop. I like love stories without schmoop. Perhaps that’s because, while I am fairly romantic myself, I’m not given over to maudlin acts of affection. So watching these two interact is quite fun.

I had nearly all the plot nailed down shortly pages into the book. Terence St. Trewes and Tossie Mering meet and quickly become engaged. But history recorded that Tossie married someone with a last name starting with the letter C. Who the mysterious Mr. C is was pretty obvious to me, particularly with all the references to classic Agatha Christie mystery cozies. And having read Walter Jon Williams’ Millenium, what happened to the bishop’s bird stump also seemed pretty obvious to me too.

Like a roller coaster, knowing where the track leads doesn’t make the ride any less fun.

Other blogged reviews:

• Becky’s Book Reviews
• Livre d’Or
• A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge
• The Only Winning Move
• Cold Iron and Rowan-Wood
• Giraffe Days Book Review

Title: To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found The Bishop’s Bird Stump At Last
Author: Connie Willis
Cover creator: Eric Dinyer (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Spectra / Random House
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 493 p.
Publication date: 1998
ISBN-10: 0-553-57538-4
Subject: Time travel — Fiction
LC classification: PS3573.I45652 T6 1997

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 re-read A Wrinkle in Time and didn’t think it was as good as I remembered. And I re-read A Wind in the Door and thought it was completely awful. Now I am on to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I was predisposed to hate after the previous two. I write that to warn you that, while I often nit-pick my reading to death, I probably noticed far more things that irritated me than even my normal. That being written, the third installment of the Time Quintet is not as bad as the second.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet starts off perhaps ten years after the events of the previous book. Meg Murry is now a young woman married to Calvin O’Keefe, but she’s home for the holidays, as are her brothers Sandy and Dennys. The President calls Mr. Murry while the family chats in the kitchen (or perhaps dining room, I’ve forgotten which) to tell him that Maddog Branzillo, dictator of small South American Vespugia, will start nuclear war within 24 hours as retribution for the U.S. using more than it’s fair share of the world’s resources.

Mrs. O’Keefe, Calvin’s mother, dinner guest, and local crotchety old lady, charges Charles Wallace with averting the coming nuclear Holocaust. So he charges out to his and Meg’s favorite star watching rock in the garden where the unicorn Gaudior takes him on a Quantum Leap journey through time to fix the Might-Have-Beens that will stop Branzillo.

So, where to start. I know, let’s have a list.

• I can’t believe the characters. A mid-20s Meg acts like and is treated like a child, for instance. Her family keeps telling her to go to bed, or to stay inside because she’s going to get a cold from night air. (And note, one does not catch colds from cold air. I wish authors would refrain from passing on folk wisdom altogether.) And she blithely accepts this treatment! Oh, I guess it’s past my bedtime. Or the town that gets whipped into witch-burning frenzy because a Llawcae family (a family that Charles Wallace visits in several different times) member married an Indian. Supposedly someone saw a cat and then someone else died and it’s the fault of the heathen witch the Indian. Fine, I can go with that. The town then sets up to hang the witch on the word of a well-known witch-hunter. At the gallows, a younger brother Llawcae chants a Welsh rune (Boil boil toil and trouble!), lightning strikes the nearby church and a second bolt zaps one of the men who raises his gun. Calling down lightning with a chant is apparently not what witches do because the townspeople change their mind and start apologizing to god for their effrontery.
• I’m getting really tired of the straight black/white dichotomy in the series. There’s no shades of gray. Good people don’t even gradually slide into evil. Give in to temptation and Bam! the character is now Hitler’s brother.
• Speaking of Hitler’s brother, let’s talk a bit about evil and genetics. Underlying the whole moral tale throughout L’Engle’s story is the curious theory that a family can be bad. As in, if you have the family’s blood in you, you are evil. Mortmain’s are always evil. Llawcae’s are always good. Descendants of Welsh legend Gwydyr will start nuclear war. The Maddoxes (descendents of Gwydyr’s brother Madoc) will not because they have peace-loving blood. The whole point of the time traveling is for Charles Wallace to engineer which the bloodline to which Mad Dog Branzillo belongs. Seriously? What a moral to teach young people! Let’s be glad L’Engle didn’t harbor animosity toward African-Americans or we’d be reading about how black blood is evil.
• Plot-wise, characters constantly show up or do things because they just know they are supposed to. It’s part of a broader trend where the author can’t seem to have understandable reasons for a whole lot of things. The President decides to call the Murry house from the situation room because Mr. Murry occasionally advises him on science matters. Not for advice. Just to let them know. And promises to call back with any developments. How about the arbitraryness of the people that Charles Wallace Quantum Leaps into? It seems to provide little point other than to allow L’Engle to write about the families in different times from a first person point of view. All but the last Might-Have-Been do nothing to change Branzillo’s bloodline. Though perhaps she saw how without reason these Leaps were, because the final piece of the story (of Gedder and Bran Maddox in founding Vespugia) is told through letters rather than first-person.
• And lastly (of the list at least), almost every freaking scene goes on longer than needed. Don’t belabor it!

It’s not all bad though. Previous books in the series featured climaxes and conflicts where nothing happened except in characters heads. Meg had to decide to love in the first. And then in the second book, she had to talk little farandolae creatures she could only see in her head of the righteousness of growing up. Here there’s murder and confrontation between Indians and whites. People dig through attics to find letters and history. And while exceedingly contrived, the family through the ages intertwinedness at least gave the story some of a framework.

So I rate it higher than A Wind in the Door, but that’s damning with faint praise.

Other blogged reviews, all positive. Though there is some negative sentiment in comments and other spots, I’m in the minority on this one.

• Book Bindings
• Pre-AP English
• The Mad Tea Party

Title: A Swiftly Tilting Planet
Author: Madeleine L’Engle
Cover creator: Cliff Nielsen
Series: Time Quintet; 3
Imprint / publisher: Laurel Leaf / Bantam Doubleday Dell
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 256 p.
Publication date: 1998
ISBN-10: 0-440-90158-8
LC classification: PZ7.L5385 Sw 1978

Shortly after starting this story there’s a scene where Louise Baltimore, one of two main characters, has sex with a robot. I was put off last year when reading Picnic on Nearside by John Varley’s over-emphasis on weird sex. I groaned. Suddenly Millennium was looking like more of the same. Thankfully it turned out otherwise.

The premise is that humans from the future have a time travel device that allows them to travel to the past. Most time travel stories are an elaborate attempt to work through the paradox issue. Don’t go back and kill your grandfather cause then you’ll never be born and you can’t go back to kill him so you will be born after all and then … Millennium has some of that and the book is weakest when it tries to explain. The short version though is that, like in a couple other time travel stories, so long as no one notices there is no paradox. Don’t take anything that will be missed, don’t leave anything that will be seen as out of place.

So for reasons unexplained people in the future have been snatching people who are about to die. For instance, from airplanes that are about to crash. The aforementioned Louise Baltimore is a snatch team leader. They go back, snatch people, and then replace them with specially grown near-human bodies from the future so that no one will notice. After the plane crashes that is.

Only one day something goes wrong. On two separate trips Louise’s team loses futuristic weapons that stun. So she has to go back in time several more times in attempts to correct the mistakes. But each attempt seems to make things worse.

The other main character is Bill Smith, the lead investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. He’s the one who discovers one of the stunners.

The book’s ending is quite satisfying. A lot of time travel stories end with a whimper and not a bang. This one is pretty good.

Orson Card wrote once about the movie Memento that it was just a gimmick and hard to watch a second time because without the gimmick ordering it was a pretty boring story. There’s a little bit of that going on in Millennium. The story ordering follows Louise as she jumps through time. Since each jump doesn’t put her progressively forward, we get to learn things before Smith does, as his story moves forward linearly. It’s a little gimmicky but it works.

Title: Millennium
Author: John Varley
Imprint / publisher: Berkley Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 247 p.
Publication date: May 1985 (originally June 1983)
ISBN-10: 0-425-07674-1
LC classification: PS3572.A724 M5 1983

Since I mentioned the book in my review of Swanwick’s story in the Year’s Best SF 17, here is a repost of a review I wrote in 2003 for Bones of the Earth over in my personal blog.

The third book I read in New Zealand is a time-travel book by Michael Swanwick. This is the first time I’ve ever read a novel by Swanwick, though I might have read a short story or two from his pen. The story is a little bit hard SF and a little bit SF farce. The plot is basically this, what if someone in the future invented time travel, then brought the technology back to the human race of the early 21st century. While most time travel novels spend a lot of time avoiding causality issues, Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth revels in the contradictions inherent in the idea. The main characters bounce around in time so much that they simply leave memos for their other selves to pick up to carry out actions in the past or future.

Paleontology becomes the centerpiece of the story. The project for which time travel is used is a series of camps scattered throughout the timeline of the dinosaurs. Except there is a saboteur in the midst of the project. The saboteur strands a group in the Jurassic era. No problem, by the standards of the book, and plenty of time to figure out what to do. Because you can manipulate time at will almost, simply go back in time 10 minutes after they are stranded. You have all the world in time to set it up. Or simply go back in time to ten minutes before the sabotage, and prevent it from happening.

It’s a lovely concept, and Swanwick runs amok with it because he doesn’t care about the contradictions. He’s messing with the subgenre of time travel.

This is one of the few books I’ve read recently that had a crappy plot (outside the time travel contradictions) and only average character development that I still liked. Simply because he messes with the time travel idiom so well.

Title: Bones of the earth
Author: Michael Swanwick
Imprint / publisher: HarperTorch / HarperCollins
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 383 p.
Publication date: February 2003
ISBN-10: 0-380-81289-4
Subject: Dinosaurs — Fiction
LC classification: PS3569.W28 B66 2002

There’s a problem any author writing about immortal beings faces. Most readers identify with characters through danger. This is why suspense movies work. The audience doesn’t want to see the good people get horribly hurt or die. But with immortal beings who can’t die, there’s no danger. Oooh, a mortal doesn’t like them? In 500 years the mortal will be dead and the immortal won’t even remember the incident.

This problem is endemic in this novel of The Company by Kage Baker. Plucked from the bowels of the Spanish Inquisition, Mendoza is transformed into an immortal self-repairing cyborg. Her job is to collect specimens of soon to be extinct plants for Dr. Zeus, the company that saved and employed her. So long as recorded history isn’t changed, they can do anything. So when these plants show up 500 years later in some unexpected place, recorded history hasn’t been changed. And the plants have been saved by Dr. Zeus.

But Mendoza can’t die or even really be hurt. She can zip to the other side of a room in a heartbeat. She can talk over internal channels with her fellow immortals. She has gadgets cleverly designed to mimic regular objects. The biggest conflict in the book is whether or not Mendoza and her fellow operatives will be discovered. Which we know, because they are time travelers, they aren’t. At least not in any effective way.

So it’s hard for me to care about Mendoza. And that leaves me with caring about the premise (the saving history angle) to drive me caring about this book. It’s hard. Sadly, that puts this book in the mediocre category for me. It had potential, but Baker had a mountain to scale here, and she didn’t make it. I may read a sequel or two to see if she managed to rectify this lack, but it’s not on my list of reading priorities.

Title: In the garden of Iden: a novel of the company
Author: Kage Baker
Covert artist: Paul Youll
Series: The Company book 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor
Format: Paperback
Length: 329 p.
Publication date: January 2006
ISBN-10: 0-765-31457-6
LC classification: PS3552.A4313I5 1998

Classic science fiction!

I tend to be scared away from a lot of stuff written pre-1900 due to the style that most writers used. It’s generally just hard to adjust from my modern idioms. That was certainly the case with The Time Machine. It’s still readable, but parts grated on me. Wells was a socialist/communist, who believed that a socialist society could come about through means other than revolution. However, he broke with most socialists who believed that there would be a capitalist class and a worker class. Wells didn’t want that, as he felt that society would be stifled. So he posited a far future, 800,000 years in the future, in which each class has separately evolved. Capital owners evolve into the Eloi, dumb and lazy and devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. And the Morlocks come from the workers, equally dumb, living underground, providing for the Eloi, but also taking away. They are as brainless as the Eloi. The unnamed Time Traveler simply gets on a bicycle with some extra levers and heads to the future and finds this utopia. After some scrapes with the Morlocks (who instinctively repair his time machine), he heads even further to the future (about 30 million years, because he believed estimates of the earth’s lifespan to be underestimated) when tidal action has stopped the earth’s rotation. There are a few creatures left just before this, but it’s mostly amorphous slime with minimal awareness. And then he comes home and tells the story to a dinner party before even taking a nap.

The Time Machine strikes me less as a story and more is a thinly veiled political argument. I’ve read worse, but as a story it falls flat a lot. The Invisible Man is a much better story. Here, Wells even gives his characters names. He matured a lot as a writer in the couple of years between The Time Machine and this book.

The begins with a bandage swaddled man taking a room at an inn. He’s an ass, but so too seem to be the innkeeper’s wife who runs the place. He’s pushy. He’s cranky. And he’s very very secretive. The townsfolk surreptitiously try to find out what’s up with the guy’s bandages. Of course, none ask him directly, but they do ask leading questions to see what sort of ailment he has. Eventually, he runs out of money to pay. But at the last minute he comes up with the money, coincidentally on the same day as a ghost-like being steal money from the town vicarage. People put two and two together, and in the ensuing melee the man removes his clothing and disappears. He sort of goes mad, attempting to rule the countryside. First by pushing a town drunk to carry the stuff that would reveal him (can’t carry money cause money floating in the air would be a telltale location for him). When the drunk eventually turns on him, he runs into an old colleague and attempts to turn him to his side. But Kemp has other ideas and leads the constabulary to their quarry. But Griffin (the invisible man) escapes again and tries to take out his revenge on Kemp. It could easily have been the plot for Hollow Man. It’s a good cautionary tale about genius thinking it’s better than everyone else. Still I couldn’t help but wonder why Griffin didn’t make a set of invisible clothes. His first experiment was to make a batch of wool invisible. So why not a suit? It would have made his reign of evil actually workable. Almost all his problems occur because he is cold and susceptible to injury when naked and invisible. Not so much the genius are we Griffin?

Title: The time machine ; and, The invisible man
Author: H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells)
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: xxxii, 284 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 1-59308-032-8
Subject: Science fiction, English
Subject: Self-experimentation in medicine — Fiction
Subject: Time travel — Fiction
Subject: Scientists — Fiction
LC classification: PR5774 .T5 2003