THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE

THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE (2007) is the first novel I've ever read by Nebula and Hugo award winning science fiction author Joe Haldeman. It won't be my last.

Haldeman, of course, is best known for THE FOREVER WAR (1974), the modern classic that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel of the year. I have a copy of FOREVER sitting in my "to-be-read" stack next to my reading chair. I hope to get around to it sometime this summer.

I'm a sucker for a good time travel story and when I ran across a copy of ACCIDENTAL at a library sale for a buck, I figured I couldn't go wrong. It's a fast paced, breezy tale about a young man, Matt Fuller, a grad student at MIT, who accidentally discovers that a device he has built for a specific scientific purpose turns out to be a time machine. Trouble is, the machine only works in one direction, forward and further into a variety of future times on Earth. He knows that at some point, he'll be able to go back in time, thanks to an appearance of one of his future selves in one of his stops along the way but until then, it's a one way trip. 

Matt eventually gains a couple of traveling companions, Martha, a beautiful young girl from the theocracy put in place on the East Coast after the "Second Coming of Jesus Christ" (an event which turns out to be a cruel hoax) and LA, a vast artificial intelligence that rules most of the West Coast in yet another future. Matt, Martha and LA (who assumes the form of a beautiful woman), eventually encounter a group of humans who function as a living time machine. The group sends LA further into the future, while returning Matt and Martha to Boston/Cambridge in the late 1800s, where they marry, raise a family and live out their lives. 

ACCIDENTAL isn't a bad little book. The journey through time is vividly described with each future earth becoming more and more unlike the time period from which the trip began. The problem is, there's nothing at stake. Nothing is really at risk here, because we know Matt will eventually return. There's no time paradox to fix, no broken timeline to repair. ACCIDENTAL serves as a guidebook to several extremely different future eras and nothing else. 

In short, THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE is a good, but far from great science fiction novel. I suspect FOREVER WAR will more completely deliver the goods. 

Recommended for genre fans.