The Accidental Time Machine

by Joe Haldeman

Overview

From the acclaimed author of Marsbound comes a mind-bending sci-fi adventure that will have you questioning the very fabric of time itself

Struggling 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 himself—or so he thinks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780441016167
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/29/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	4.00(w) x 6.70(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joe Haldeman is a Vietnam veteran whose classic novels The Forever War and Forever Peace both have the rare honor of winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He has served twice as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America and is currently an adjunct professor teaching writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Editorial Reviews

A time-travel yarn in the classic style from Haldeman (A Separate War, 2006, etc.). In 2058, MIT graduate student Matt Fuller realizes that the calibrator he's built is actually a forward-traveling time machine. He tests it with a pet turtle, and then sticks it into a 1956 bright-red Thunderbird and escapes his rather unpromising present. Each time the machine is activated, it travels farther ahead. His first jaunt lands him about a month into the future, where he's faced with a murder charge; subsequent trips, impelled either by simply awkward or by downright dangerous situations, transport him to strange and often unpleasant futures, inhabited by religious fundamentalists, ignorant lotus-eaters or, apparently, by no humans at all. Along with two companions, an innocent young woman and a potentially duplicitous artificial intelligence, Matt persists in his journey, armed with evidence that suggests that just ahead of him lies the means to return to his starting point. A great deal of fun and compulsively readable while it lasts, and it leaves the reader wanting more.

Kirkus Reviews

An MIT researcher manages to build a time machine in his basement one evening after his girlfriend dumps him for another man. Haldeman's homage to H.G. Wells's classic is equally visionary and filled with incredible plot twists, the most unusual of which is that Fuller discovers his time machine only goes into the future. Narrator Kevin Free reads in a voice that makes Fuller an average guy listeners can relate to despite his remarkable job. Free takes listeners to futuristic worlds, each as dangerous and foreboding as the last, and never sounds disconnected from the story. A fun adventure. L.B. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2008 - AudioFile