The Accidental Time Machine | 
 enlarge | Author: Joe Haldeman
Publisher: Ace
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy New: $4.16
You Save: $3.83 (48%)
New (31) Used (13) from $3.98
Rating:  86 reviews
Sales Rank: 7724
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0441016162
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780441016167
ASIN: 0441016162
Publication Date: July 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 81 more reviews...
 A very fun read December 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very fun book. It's a great quick read, the kind of thing you sit down with at 3:00 in the afternoon, and put down at 8:00 pretty well satisfied. It's basically an adventure romp, and no more, but heck, those are fun.
But I do want to comment on something I am seeing over and over with modern science fiction-- what's with all the fundamentalist Christian totalitarian theocracies? Over and over... is there some kind of agreed upon cabal that this theme shall appear in every single book? Is this how you make you "serious sci-fi writer" bones or what?
Anyway, it's not too bad in this book-- it's not like some of the really snotty Christian-sneer stuff out there (Robert J. Sawyer, I'm looking at you), but it's a sort of surreality bubble in a book that otherwise seems fairly thoughtful. And from the Christian Totalitarian part (female circumcision, scholarly study of the holy book), I almost wonder if the author didn't originally have another religion written down, that got changed by a simple search-and-replace by some editor to be less controversial.
Unwinding the time paradox December 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Since H.G. Well's The Time Machine, we've been fascinated by the idea of being able to travel into our past or even our own future. And for decades, science fiction authors have speculated on how this could be done, despite having Einstein throw a wet blanket over the whole theory.
One of the biggest hurdles of time travel is The Paradox. That traveling, especially to your past, would cause too many paradox's, thus causing a possible unwinding of the universe, ala Back to the Future.
One theory is that if time travel was feasible, we could only go forwards, never back.
That's the premise of Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine, a whimsical comic tale of Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller, who while toiling as a lowly MIT assistant researcher, accidentally creates, through no fault of his own, a time machine while studying the quantum relationship between gravity and light. When he hits its reset button, the box disappears, only to reappear a second later. Soon Matt discovers every time he hits the reset buttom, the machince goes missing twelve times longer.
After a few expeirments, he discovers he can attach a metal box to it and then send objects -like a store bought turtle - into the future. This leads to the idea of taking himself into the future. Borrowing an old car from a friend, Matt sends himself into the near future, only to discover he is a wanted man in the murder of the friend he borrowed the car from (he dropped dead of a heart attack when he saw Matt vanish before his eyes). Bailed out by a man -apparently - who could pass for an older version of himself, Matt decides to beat the rap by traveling further into the future, in hope of finding a safe haven.
The Accidental Time Machine is a swift read, a hallmark of Haldeman's sf style. He can create such a vivid world full of bright and wonderful ideas, yet present them in prose that need not go on forever. However, at times, you would've hoped he stayed in some the future worlds of Earth, like a society ruled by religion, with a strange blend of high and low technology, or the one where bartering is an artform and AI commonplace.
There is a deus ex machina towards the end which could be off putting, but its a small issue. Plus, while sort of saw the ending, you always knew that the time travel was one way -despite the broadly suggested idea that somewhere in the future, Matt did travel back.
 Intriguing Premise, Dull Exposition December 21, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Time travel is a common theme in science fiction, providing authors an opportunity to explore multiple future scenarios and the possible consequences of moving back and forth in time. In this book, the author, an MIT professor, tells of a graduate lab assistant who discovers that an apparatus he has built for quantum research travels into the future every time he activates it. Moreover, it takes anything connected to it along and each jump is exponentially further into the future. Unfortunately, not much is made of the possible impact of this travel (although in one future the student discovers that someone else has taken credit for his "discovery") and the imagined futures are dreadfully dull. The protagonist spends way too much time in a future where religion has become accepted as science, including at MIT. Haldeman fails to use his MIT connections to to explore the quantum physics that could theoretically make time travel possible.
 You could do much, much better than this... December 15, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have to admit I could not finish this book. The combination of a lackluster plot, glaring technical mistakes, and weak character development was just too much for me. There are so many excellent science fiction writers to choose from: Stephen Baxter, Ray Bradbury, Robert Charles Wilson, Greg Bear, John Scalzi, Robert Silverberg, Ursula Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, to name a few of my favorites. My advice would be to check out some of these before trying this one.
accidentally awesome December 11, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Matt Fuller is your average guy, a bit on the lazy side, stuck in a dead end job as a lab assistant at MIT. He is building a calibrator when it suddenly disappears and then reappears a second later. He experiments with the machine and realizes that he has built a time machine. This particular time machine only goes forward in time and the interval it travels into the future increases by 12 each time.
If Matt is touching the time machine, he also travels with it. With nothing going in his life, he decides to travel. The first few times, he only travels a little bit, but he keeps ending up situations where his only escape is to jump forward again. Haldeman offers a unique perspective on the world in each of the futures presented. When he meets and falls for a young woman, he must decide what is best for the two of them and what kind of future world he wants to live in.
This book is a fun and fast sci fi read. It will appeal to sci fi fans as well as your average fiction reader. Nothing is too far "out there" or fantastical for the average readers' taste.
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