Joe Haldeman’s latest novel, The Accidental Time Machine focuses on Matt Fuller, a researcher at
MIT, who discovers time travel when he creates a machine which should only
calibrates lab equipment. Instead, the machine flickers and, using
scientific methodology, Fuller determines it traveled into the future.
Further experimentation allows him to make educated guesses about its
behavior.
The novel tracks Fuller’s journey into the far
future, beginning with incremental steps when he finds himself in the near
enough future that he can still find people he knows, until he reaches a
point when the world is foreign to him and he just hopes to be able to
find a period where the invention of a time machine that will send him
back to his native 2050 is a possibility.
The Accidental
Time Machine has a similar vibe to Haldeman’s classic Forever War. Both novels feature a protagonist who finds himself
jumping forward from his own future, unable to return. However there is a
difference between the two novels, partly in the characters’ goals.
William Mandella is actively fighting in a war against the Taurans
while Fuller’s journey through time is more random and purposeless.
However, both characters share a sense of isolation from the
societies in which they find themselves.
One of the more intriguing ideas that Haldeman
follows up with is the cyclical nature of history.
With each of Fuller’s jumps through time taking him exponentially
further into the future, he finds himself in a theocracy relatively close
to his own time. On
subsequent jumps to a more secular time and place, he finds himself more
simpatico with the natives, despite the much larger chronological
difference.
The book does have one narrative weakness that
threatens to break the suspension of disbelief.
The inventor (or thief) of the only known functional time machine,
Fuller achieves a fame (or notoriety) which seems out of proportion to his
activities, especially since nobody was able to reproduce the machine.
When he arrives in the far future, his story is still known, even
though millennia have passed. Necessary, perhaps, for the story, but not particularly
realistic.
Haldeman introduces an apparent cause and effect
paradox that reassures Fuller that he’ll eventually return to his own
time. It also offers
foreshadowing for the reader, although in the end, Haldeman does not
depict the action as either Fuller or the reader expects, not only making
that paradox’s resolution into a surprise, but offering up a few other
surprises as well.
The Accidental
Time Machine, as many of Haldeman’s works, is written in a style
which eschews stylistic extravagance.
While many authors attempt innovative writing styles which all too
often hinder the reader’s enjoyment and understanding of the action,
Haldeman writes in a straight-forward manner that allows the reader to
most fully appreciate Haldeman’s plot, characters, and themes.
Haldeman’s futures don’t appear to be that
different from visions of the future science fiction is already familiar
with. At the same time, while
his theocracy seems a trifle clichéd, he does try to bring new ideas to
his version of that future, as well as others with a modicum of success.
In some ways, The
Accidental Time Machine is a throwback to an earlier style of science
fiction, but in a nostalgic, yet fresh way.
Haldeman’s writing is better than most of the stories written
forty or fifty years ago, which elevates the novel above the stories it
sometimes seems to be channeling.
