The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman
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Book Reviews of The Accidental Time Machine
Book Review: A book with a hook
Summary: 4 Stars
The hook was set within the first couple of pages. From then on, I was pulled through time. It was one of those books that you don't want to end!Book Review: 75% great, final 25% is disapointing
Summary: 4 Stars
It really had me going until they went to the theocracy, then I had to wonder if he just handed off the story to someone else.Book Review: Book Review: The Accidental Time Machine
Summary: 3 Stars
Surprise. I normally review books on actual and not fictional technology, but I came across the hardcopy version of this book at my local library and, having not read a Haldeman novel in a couple of decades, decided to revisit science fiction as one might revisit an old girlfriend. I wanted to see how much my interest in the genre and specifically Haldeman's writing, had held up over time. I'm also kind of a sucker for time travel stories.
It is a page turner. I reserved the novel as something to "wind down" with before going to bed and there were a few nights when I pushed my "reasonable consciousness" envelope by reading longer than I had intended. The beginning of the book introduces a mystery discovered by protagonist Matt Fuller, an MIT graduate student in the more or less near future. Watching Matt try to figure out how a simple piece of lab equipment he'd built had somehow developed the ability to move forward in time was a definite hook for me. He's a bright, but not brilliant underachiever who's given the opportunity for "greatness", but only if he keeps his discovery a secret. This means he must go the way of so many other "mad scientists" by using himself as the primary experimental subject.
Each push of the button sends Matt further into the future in a geometric progression and Matt ends up about 15 years into his own future feeling more useless than in his own time. Hailed as a glorified lab rat and with his Professor taking all the credit for discovering this method of time travel, Matt eventually escapes the dead end of this existence by "stealing" the time machine (it was MIT property after all) and continuing to launch himself further forward in time.
Unfortunately, once Matt leaves a future history that's any where near familiar to him (or the reader), the novel begins to fall apart. It is still quite readable, but Haldeman's social commentary becomes glaringly apparent. In this next jump, Matt encounters a future where "Christers" (Christians) have taken over the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. after the supposed return of Jesus. Haldeman is sadly transparent in portraying Christians (and probably all people of faith) as either conniving schemers, buffoons, or innocent pawns. I was hoping that Matt's encounter with the lovely and truly faithful Martha would have some sort of impact on his own state of faith (or lack thereof, since Matt is a self-declared Jewish atheist), but such is not the case. Haldeman uses this part of the book to make his case that any truly intelligent person will depend solely on scientific observation to explore and discover the universe, and that faith is merely surrendering to superstition.
As a person of faith reading Haldeman's rendition of life "post-return" of Jesus, I had to determine that either he didn't do his Biblical homework, or he was making a point that Bible-believers will disregard what "the Word" actually says for a hand full of technologically generated miracles. The "faithful" in the Massachusetts of the 23rd Century blithely return to a world of a medieval religious rule with futuristic technology reserved for the ruling class. No Christian I know would have considered Jesus dropping in on the President of the United States as his first port of call to be even remotely valid, but somehow Haldeman portrays this as not a problem for the "elect". A rather simplistic view of people of faith which was one of the most disappointing parts of the book. I guess the author never met a believer that had a brain and perhaps the Scarecrow in the "Wizard of Oz" was the archetypal Christian, but I digress.
It seems that Haldeman's pet peeves aren't reserved for Christianity though, in that Matt's next jump, some thousands of years into the future beyond the "Christers", takes him into a world where global society is based on eBay. A heroic but hapless Martha saves Matt's life while he's trying to escape her point in history, but at the cost of joining him on his journey into the future. While Matt confirms his understanding that Christ's return was a sham (it's now in the history books) put on by the government (talk about lack of separation between church and state), Martha, who manages to hold on to her faith for some time, eventually watches it crumble to dust as their journey forward through time continues.
Matt and Martha do encounter a "savior" of a sort, both in their dreams and during each jump forward in time as they become unwitting victims of an artificial intelligence who needs Matt to help her (yes, it's a gendered intelligence) escape the boredom of running the "eBay society". For some mysterious reason (which is never revealed), this intelligence believes that seeking the ultimate end of the universe is the answer to a "life" of governing a bunch of wealthy but mentally vacant shopping drones.
I could say that the book becomes less and less plausible from there, but when predicting the future, how can you say what will or won't happen? Matt struggles with his liberal ideals, especially towards women. On the one hand, he ends up explaining the various sexist aspects of the Bible to Martha and, on the other hand, arguing with himself about whether he should seduce the lovely and virginal Martha, or "act like a man" and protect her from the surrounding dangers, which includes himself.
The book has a happy ending of sorts. Matt and Martha are rescued, both from their virtual captor and from forward time traveling, and given a choice of returning to a specific place or a specific time, not both. Without blatantly revealing the ending, Matt discovers several things (but not how time travel actually works). He does discover that he really loves Martha and treats her honorably, ultimately marrying her. He also discovers his "niche" if you will, by becoming a brilliant scientist, but only in the past. It's a little easier to be, or at least seem brilliant, if you know what scientific discoveries are about to be made.
Martha discovers more, but for me, one discovery was sad. She loses her faith, but does fall in love and marry Matt. I suppose never seeing the return of Christ (or the coming of the Messiah, from Matt's perspective) would have to lead to the conclusion that the Bible, both Christian and Jewish, is just a collection of morality tales, not much different than the novel I'm reviewing. Martha leaves Christ behind and earns a degree in one of the sciences before "settling down" and having babies. Matt considers this an achievement far greater than his own. He achieves "greatness" by virtue of using what any 21st century physics grad student would know in a past where that knowledge was just on the cusp of being discovered. Matt (and thus Haldeman) considers Martha earning an undergraduate degree more significant, because he had to leave the fantasy of her faith behind to do it. Are education and faith truly mutually exclusive?
The young couple finally take the one piece of advice Matt's father ever gave him, which was to "play the cards you're dealt". Sans time machine, Matt and Martha make a life for themselves in the time and place they were sent to by their saviors from the far future. At this point, domestic bliss is almost irrelevant and the next several decades are described in mere paragraphs. This unhappily bypasses the opportunity for both Matt and Martha to narrate their impressions on a history that the audience would have either lived through (the 20th century) or at least have heard about from their parents (or people like me). It could have been the most significant part of the novel but Haldeman treats it as an afterthought.
The ending is ultimately unsatisfying to me. While Matt and Martha happily set up their household and family at some point in the near (historically speaking) past, their fate is as much accidental as anything else in this tale. The novel seems to reveal a certain truth about secularist and atheist thought; that life is random and ultimately meaningless. You end up where you end up, live, breathe, work, have babies, and then die without a point. There really are no lessons learned unless you take into consideration that a mediocre mid-21st century MIT grad student finds his purpose only by going into the past where foreknowledge makes him seem "cutting edge". Aren't we all like that though, at least in our fantasies? Who hasn't said to themselves, "If only I could go back with what I know now..."
Sorry, Mr. Haldeman. This is a nice little piece of fantasy with liberal (politically and otherwise) amounts of personal and social commentary, but not your best work. Of course, if I re-read The Forever War after so long, would I be as disappointed?
Originally published at the A Million Chimpanzees blog:
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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: 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.