Joe Haldeman
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Subjects -> Science Fiction & Fantasy -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Haldeman, Joe
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Subjects -> Science Fiction & Fantasy -> Science Fiction -> General AAS
Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81
Average rating: 3.5 of 5
good not great 3 out of 5 stars.
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The book at least stayed within the bounds of possibility. The hero finds himself the proud discoverer of a time machine with no reverse. It's a great start to a novel but the hero is more victim than take charge guy and you never know who or what the villian is.
Haldeman's Accidental... 3 out of 5 stars.
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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.
Editorial Review:
NOW IN PAPERBACK-FROM THE AUTHOR OF MARSBOUND
Grad- school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when he inadvertently creates a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose in taking a time-machine trip himselfor so he thinks.
