The Accidental Time Machine

This is a very well done afternoon fun ride of a sci-fi novel.
Funny and suprising at all turns. a great concept that I would love reading about again!
This is a quick read, with fast paced action and a great sense of humor.
It is a huge thumbs up for anyone who loves quirky sci-fi.
I gave a copy to a family member for Christmas.
I only give my favorites for Christmas.
Enough said.

Tom Addis

I enjoyed this book and will definitely read more from the same author. My only complaint, and it really isnt much of one, is that the story seemed to sag just before the end. I recommend for sci-fi fans.

The key idea of this book is appealing especially for those who went through some academic research (a mistakenly built piece of equipment which turns out to be a time machine). However the story feels like loosing the point sometimes with a much worse abrupt end written to cut short an otherwise good book.

It seemed to me the book was written for the young crowd but I also found it was interesting and creative.

I would not read this type book on a regular basis but every once in a while might be fun.

I loved the book. This book is great. I liked the span of years involved in the story over thousands of years and several different types of cultures. Those who loved HG Wells book the time machine will love this book. It is well written and the storyline is great. I would buy another book by the author.

Whilst the characters are relatively one dimensional, Joe Haldeman delivers a rollicking good ride through a variety of futures that are at once far-fetched, but entirely plausible. An entertaining mix of the humane and the machine, both pursuing their ultimate destinies. A good read.

I've liked everything I've read by Haldeman, especially Accidental Time Machine.
Entertaining and eminently readable
I would definitely recommend, especially for a plane flight or vacation reading

This author has a very smooth and well paced writing style. This particular story is an update to The Time Machine by Wells. It has some interesting additions by way of the 'Christers' who take over the east coast of the US in a couple of hundred years and an even more interesting sprawling Los Angeles that reaches all the way to Phoenix. Ultimately though neither of these is traversed as well as they should be. The author seems to be willing to merely describe the Christers world for instance without delving into adequate criticism of it. It shows a very modern day attitude toward destructive influences, that is it demonstrates a modern day sort of non-chalantness toward them.

It was very readble, but could have been so much more.

The book is not great, but it made for fairly light reading and a somewhat entertaining read. There are some fairly amusing tips-of-the-hat to other works of fiction and some very under-developed situations of peril that are laughable at resolution. I would tell friends that like sci-fi that I have read this but I would not recommend it. There is nothing really outstanding about the book.

The book is not great, but it made for fairly light reading and a somewhat entertaining read. There are some fairly amusing tips-of-the-hat to other works of fiction and some very under-developed situations of peril that are laughable at resolution. I would tell friends that like sci-fi that I have read this but I would not recommend it. There is nothing really outstanding about the book.

It has been a long time since I spent a whole day reading a book because I could not put it down. It's light yes, but fun, like one of those old romantic comedy movies you see on late night TV. The humour is very low keyed. Well done Joe.

this work started out as interesting, then rapidly got boring and I lost interest in it, although I did finish it.. there are just too many loose ends that never get resolved. It ends as if the author ran out of ideas and just said "ok... enough words to fill the required pagers.. lets just end it now..".. I'm sorry that I wasted my $$ for the Kindle version.. or any version...

For me, this one felt a lot like SCI-FI from the fifties and seventies: poor style, a couple nice scenes and no more than one idea. This is a short story, blown up to a throughly disappointing novel without an ending.

I wonder if the book was even written by Joe Haldeman. Sorry Joe but I can not even say that the book was worth the time I gave it. I wish I had a time machine to go back and get the time I wasted reading this book. Yet I would recommend anyone read Joe Haldeman.

I don't need all the ends tied up, but to introduce a character like future Matt in the being of the book and never discover or even meet him was wrong.

The key to any book is whither you like the character? Matt made no sense to me. He never questions who put up the Million Dollars bond money or where the number 1,000,000.00 came from and just assumes it was a future Matt? He does not question the note to get in the car and jump again. I don't understand what his reasons where for jumping except that he assumes future Matt was the person that jumped back and put up the money as well as left him the note to jump. Yet we never does find out which future Matt did tell our story Matt that he needs to jump. Even the reason Matt does jumped again is not clear except to think that he has to in order for him to be the future Matt which comes back and saves him. Which again is strange because our Matt doesn't seem to be in any real danger to speak of except that the note tells him to do it. It just had lots and lots of unanswered questions, which would have been great if there had been a second book. We are lead to believe our Matt will one day be the future Matt that does figures out reverse time travel and does puts up one Million for a cash bond and write the note telling past Matt to go find the car and time jump. But it never happens? The character's actions just never made any sense to me. Do we just assume that future Matt that jumped back in time just want ahead and jumped forward after he gave past Matt the money? Did it not ever occur to him that future Matt the rich Matt wanted him to jump so that future Matt can stick around and avoid the Paradox of having two Matts in the same time plane?

Unfortunately we find that a look alike Jesus Christ is all behind it. Which is some how connected to out Matt, because should Matt our Matt not exist than our look alike JC and other will not exist. If you make any sense out of this book please email me.

Since we never did met the future Matt that did jump back and started our Matt on his journey in the end the book made no sense.

Sorry, but I do recommend you read any other of Joe Haldeman's other books.

A few too many open ends. There are interesting points, such as mildly explaining some futuristic aspects. The time travel possibility was interesting and belieavable, though as to why only his could was a mystery. I can buy random error, though I see a couple other reviewers could not. Could have been much better with a little more explanation of what was fully going on instead of the slow moving build up it creates that never quite get resolved.

Also, the main character is difficult to identify with, due to being a beer guzzling, drug using, MIT student. It's really just personal preference, but I tend to feel that if you're into science then you should at least follow some of its proven recommendations. These being adequate sleep, exercise, non-drug use, reasoning out decisions, etc, which amazingly the main character does all entirely backwards. Again, just personal preference, but very difficult for me to identify with to fully enjoy.

I will not spoil the ending but I will say it's one of the best endings I've ever read. It is great at times and very average at times but when it was good it was very good. I will read it again someday and do recommend it.

It's been a very enjoyable read all the way,it flows seamlessly and it kept me wanting to read more and more.It could be me as i love time travel but this book really left me looking for more from the same subject.Well worth the few $ !!!

I just finished Sandworms of Dune; one of the worst books I've ever read.
Has science fiction died? Haldeman answers that question with a resounding NO!

I started TATM and found I couldn't put it down. This is one fun read.

I was a teen again, carrying a paperback in my back pocket, reading it any chance I got: walking, riding the bus, riding the train, eating, in class, and so on.

Loved this book. It is the first I've read by Joe Haldeman, but needless to say, I will be reading everything that he's written. I loved the characters, and it strikes the perfect balance between dark and humorous.

The book is at best "OK"; beginning was rather exciting, but it looked to me that the author was not sure what to do with the idea and how to bring a conclusion to the story. From my perspective, the last two thirds of the book were just so-so.

A mediocre telling of fairly predictable story. While this story brings nothing really new to the table, it is an enjoyable adventure. The plot is reminiscent of a Saturday morning kids special, with a few adult moments thrown in. It is light on science and heavy on interpersonal interactions. It is a book I would have enjoyed much more had I found it when I was 13.

I love science fiction stories and I am most interested in time travel stories. I think that the theory of time travel is one of the most fascinating theories in the world. I have read and re-read The Accidental Time Machine and I think that it is by far the best time travel story I have ever read. Thank you Joe Haldeman. "Keep em comin".

I think this would be an enjoyable read for a younger audience that is just starting to become curious about physics. The story is just not exciting and a bit trite. A slacker travels through time and predictably winds up getting the girl.

The author engages you at first b/c he sets it up as a bit of a mystery, but the mystery and tensions never really resolve in an interesting way. Rather, the books just peters on.

The Accidental Time Machine is a pleasant, although shallow story about an accidental time traveler. It follows the misadventures of Matt Fuller, a somewhat unsuccessful physics student at MIT. One day while working with a piece of equipment he built he discovers, to his surprise, that it works as a time machine! He tries to duplicate it but it won't work, but does figure out how to use it to travel through time himself. As he travels further forward in time we see major changes in the earth and humanity. In one era he runs across a theocracy and again, accidentally, ends up taking along Martha, an innocent, beautiful woman who has grown up in a religious culture. This leads to some rather humorous adventures between the two as they move even further forward in time where humans seem to have left the earth. But how to get back? Well, I don't want to give away too much of the story.

Overall this is an entertaining, quick read. The only drawback is the lack of drama or emotion displayed by the characters as they are thrust into very different circumstances than the one they are used to and the somewhat quick, hollow treatment of the future worlds they discover. As the title might suggest, this is a lighthearted, humorous adventure.

For a required review, to a kindle book I'm not finished with yet, this takes it down a notch. For the store to email me
and say 'it's time for my review now'. Then on the review page say no three stars won't be enough of a review. the store.you'll have to wait till I finish.

Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine is the story of Matthew Fuller, a miserable excuse for a graduate assistant struggling through his professional and personal life who discovers that the calibrator he's been working on in a lab at MIT actually functions as a one-way time machine to the future. Using this mysterious device, Matt travels to bizarre (and frankly, unconvincing) futures of the Earth and the Moon, and perhaps as a direct result of his unsuccessful love life in his own time, he manages to find love with a younger woman from the distant future. Some have placed The Accidental Time Machine on the same level as H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, but to do so is a grave mistake similar to comparing a child's finger painting project to Da Vinci's Mona Lisa simply because they are both paintings. Considering the only lessons of this novel are to run from your problems, to leave all of your hopes of success to chance, and to lazily ride on the coat tails of others, Haldeman's work is neither a source of morality nor literary significance. The purpose must be purely to entertain, but the novel barely achieves that. The subject matter is surely meant to appeal to young adults with an interest in science, but alternating between references to casual drug abuse, alcoholism, and sexual perversion with some references to science awkwardly sprinkled in, this novel is not only inappropriate, it's also tiring and unamusing. The Accidental Time Machine lacks quality character development, suspense, convincing romance, and insight into the future, all things that one would expect, or at least hope, to find in a time traveling adventure. Because Matthew Fuller is developed as a character that the reader in no way cares about, what happens to him doesn't matter in the least, thereby destroying any possibility for suspense. Also, the pace of the novel is unbelievably erratic. The first half is a slow crawl through Matt's experience with the device in his own time, and the second half is devoted to his travels to the future that fly by so quickly that the reader is not given a chance to have any sort of emotional response to the future of mankind and the downfall of civilization itself on Earth. The climax, if it can be given that label, and the resolution of Haldeman's work are as disappointing as the rest of the plot, and yes, the only satisfying part of the entire novel is when it finally comes to an end after an unbearable 257 pages. The only person imaginable who could enjoy this terrible piece of fiction is a lonely, hardcore science fiction nerd with a couple of days to kill. It's possible, though unlikely, that I'm missing something that other critics and readers of this book seem to find. However, if you have enjoyed time travel novels in the past, do not read this one. It'll ruin your love of time travel paradoxes, and it is an insult to the science fiction genre entirely.

This well-written, fast-paced time-travel novel would have been stellar were it not for the author’s using this forum to express his thinly veiled contempt for Christianity (and possibly religion in general). He paints Christians of the future as morally inconsistent, backward, gullible, ignorant, scientifically illiterate, even buffoonish caricatures of conservative Christians (whom he disparages by name) and reduces Christ’s Second Coming to a malevolent hologram. Evidently he has overlooked the fact that many giants in the scientific community have been Christians, among them Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton ("The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being”), Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle (discoverer of "Boyle's Law," which describes the behavior of gases), Michael Faraday (who revolutionized physics with his discoveries in the fields of electricity and magnetism), Gregor Mendel, a monastery abbot who laid the mathematical foundations of genetics years before Darwin wrote Origin of the Species, and many others. Though not a Christian per se, Albert Einstein himself firmly rejected the notion of a non-created universe. As he once remarked to a young physicist: "I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts. The rest are details."

Atheists and Deiphobes/Christophobes might appreciate this title, but I would not recommend it for readers of faith.

I've often said that Joe Haldeman is the most interesting and talented Science Fiction writer of our time. He is an artisan who experiments with different writing styles, yet always manages to be a master storyteller. Haldeman's current novel does not disappoint. Like his classic "Forever War", he creates a novel whose protagonist is thrust across millennia; but, this is an entirely different treatment of the topic. Haldeman seems to prefer a very compact writing style and his current novel is a clinic on how to implement it correctly. Overall, I think this is one of Haldeman's best. The wordsmithing is excellent. The story is well-told and one of the most humorous novels he has written.

You write what you know, and Joe has pulled from his professorial experiences at MIT to write a very playful tribute to that Institution, its professors, and its students. But, you'll appreciate the references regardless of your background. His characters are quirky and well-developed. The situations he creates for his protagonist range from the mundane to the absurd as he explores differing views on science and technology and what the future may hold. You will also find some pointed commentary about the relationship of current politics to science as well.

Within this framework, Haldeman has interwoven a story of a man coming of age and discovering himself in the process. Told with great humor and affection, this novel will please both Haldeman fans and those who have not previously read his works. I wish I had a time machine to see what Haldeman has for us next! I most highly recommend it!!

I never really slam a novel. I have a little idea of how much an author puts into the printed word. With this in mind I must say I felt like I was reading a time traveller yarn from the 1940's or 1950's. It has that flavor and pacing. I can see this being written by Heinlein or one of his contemporaries. This would be fine if it was meant to be a parody or even a homage to the "Golden Age" of sci-fi. I never got that feeling. It as just same-old same-old. A real disappointment.

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.

Dont buy it. Chucking in mentions of string theory and branes does not make it SF. There are no explanations for anything. There is nothing new. Towards the end, all I could think about was "Back to the Future" movie.

Ok, while not the GREATEST Sci-Fi book I have read, I did enjoy it.

As posted by the lone disappointed airplane traveler, I too found the 1st 40-50 pages a bit slow paced. After that,well, I was sad to hit the end. Oddly the final paragraph made me smile. Utterly unexpected side twist of the most obscure and lol moments of the book.

Ok, so, not for KIDS due to 2 pages. It is not graphic, but a bit "detailed" for a younger mind to embark upon till his mid-teens :)

I found it VERY similar to HG Wells TIme Machine in methodology and progression. Substitute 2 names for 2 others and you would see what I meant. Substituting an AI for an immortal and you have the 3rd ....BUT it strayed enough to make it modern and fun. I gave it a 5 because the last page surprised me. Did not see it coming and I am delighted when surprised. yes, those whom have read it, it was mild, but should have been seen, but was delivered so craftily....otherwise it would have gotten a 4 :)

Wow! What a thought provoking book! In general, I really enjoy time travel books. This one was a little more technical than I typically like, but it was handled in such a way that it was thoroughly enjoyable. And, I was very happy with the ending. It actually gave me chills.

Matt Fuller is a research assistant at MIT. He's been helping professor Marsh build a calibrator for a research project. One day, when Matt pushes the reset button, the calibrator disappears for a second. Upon pushing the reset button a second time, Matt discovers that it stays gone longer. Matt devises a test to record the time machine leaving and even sends along a turtle, Herman, to see how a living creature reacts to time travel. Upon Herman's return, it's evident that Herman appears to have only been gone a few minutes, while in real time, he's been gone for 3 days. At this, Matt decides to send himself into the future to further test the time machine. The only problem, it only goes into the future, and it goes 6 times farther each time the button is pushed. Which means, that Matt will first jump 40 days into the future, then 15 years, then perhaps centuries into the future. What will the world be like then? Will he ever be able to return to his own time?

Wow! What a thought provoking book! In general, I really enjoy time travel books. This one was a little more technical than I typically like, but it was handled in such a way that it was thoroughly enjoyable. And, I was very happy with the ending. It actually gave me chills.

Matt Fuller is a research assistant at MIT. He's been helping professor Marsh build a calibrator for a research project. One day, when Matt pushes the reset button, the calibrator disappears for a second. Upon pushing the reset button a second time, Matt discovers that it stays gone longer. Matt devises a test to record the time machine leaving and even sends along a turtle, Herman, to see how a living creature reacts to time travel. Upon Herman's return, it's evident that Herman appears to have only been gone a few minutes, while in real time, he's been gone for 3 days. At this, Matt decides to send himself into the future to further test the time machine. The only problem, it only goes into the future, and it goes 6 times farther each time the button is pushed. Which means, that Matt will first jump 40 days into the future, then 15 years, then perhaps centuries into the future. What will the world be like then? Will he ever be able to return to his own time?

Wow! What a thought provoking book! In general, I really enjoy time travel books. This one was a little more technical than I typically like, but it was handled in such a way that it was thoroughly enjoyable. And, I was very happy with the ending. It actually gave me chills.

Matt Fuller is a research assistant at MIT. He's been helping professor Marsh build a calibrator for a research project. One day, when Matt pushes the reset button, the calibrator disappears for a second. Upon pushing the reset button a second time, Matt discovers that it stays gone longer. Matt devises a test to record the time machine leaving and even sends along a turtle, Herman, to see how a living creature reacts to time travel. Upon Herman's return, it's evident that Herman appears to have only been gone a few minutes, while in real time, he's been gone for 3 days. At this, Matt decides to send himself into the future to further test the time machine. The only problem, it only goes into the future, and it goes 6 times farther each time the button is pushed. Which means, that Matt will first jump 40 days into the future, then 15 years, then perhaps centuries into the future. What will the world be like then? Will he ever be able to return to his own time?

This book had some very interesting ideas in it, but it was boring. Maybe it's just that I'm not as into hard science fiction like this if it is indeed hard SF. There was a lot of scientific jargon in this book that some readers may find delightful, just not me. I think the main reason I almost didn't finish it is that I could care less what happened to the main character. Nothing about him made me interested in him, or made me like him. He's just kind of a loser who accidentally discovered a time machine. I'd still say give it a try if it sounds like a book you'd really enjoy, it just wasn't for me - but I've read worse books for sure. Haldeman's writing style was kind of vanilla, which can be good if it is meant to be that way to get out of the way and just give you the story - but in this case for me the story was kind of slow and boring. Once I did get into the last third or fourth of the book it was a fairly fun ride through time, and did become much more interesting. It might have worked better if the protag met the girl earlier in his journey - that was when I started to like it. That's about all I have to say for this book. I gave it 3/5 stars because on the store when you hover over the 3rd star it says "it was ok." That's how I feel, it wasn't terrible, it was ok. Still it has some pretty cool ideas and might be an good read for the more scientifically minded reader.

The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman.

Coincidentally, I was recently talking about a Poul Anderson short story, "Flight to Forever", which has some resemblance to this novel.

The basic premise is similar with some twists. Matt, a grad student at MIT, accidental invents the eponymous time machine. Its only a one way device, and the "jumps" are logarithmically longer and longer, and so his journey quickly becomes a one way trip to the future, looking for a way to reverse the process and return to his own time.

Along the way, he discovers strange cultures, picks up a passenger, and finally manages to return to the past, but not in the way or manner that he expects.

So on the basics, its pretty similar to the story mentioned above. The concept as Haldeman executes it, though is a little more polished in the physics. Anderson's story was really a device for sending his protagonist through time. Haldeman takes some things into consideration that Anderson doesn't--for example the idea that the time machine's "landing location" might change through time thanks to the motion of celestial bodies.

Like Anderson's story, we wind up with some strange future societies that Matt and his inadvertent fellow passenger whom he picks up encounter. A religious theocracy, a society which seems to be Ebay writ large, and a post-Singularity beings are among the challenges that Matt faces as he jumps through time.

The novel is short, and aside from the religious theocracy and Matt's present (in the mid 21st century), we never really spend a lot of time getting to the nuts and bolts of the worlds. Haldeman could have spent endless pages on each of these stops, and in some cases, I would have liked to learn a little more about Matt's stops. Also, the ending is, frankly, a deus ex machina in an almost literal sense. There are also aspects to the narrative (the idea that there are multiple timelines, or multiple versions of Matt being sent back) that are mentioned in a few sentences and never really explored fully. Also, the explanation of just how the accidental time machine really worked is very much glossed over.

So I have to say that I was disappointed in the novel overall, which unfortunately (after Forever Peace) means that I've now read two novels by Haldeman that I don't like in comparison to one (Forever War). I suppose that he is going to now drop off on the list of authors that I will read, sad to say. The Accidental Time Machine is not a *bad* novel, but its, to use culinary terminology, definitely a little undercooked and the flavors didn't meld well. It was a disappointment.

Tripping around the internet I have seen a variety of reviews for Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Joe Haldeman's latest offering, The Accidental Time Machine. They range from effusive praise to damning criticism and everything in between. What many of them do, without fail, is admit that Joe Haldeman is a singular author with stellar works of science fiction to his credit. I myself have limited experience with the works of Joe Haldeman, and unless this book wins an award this year, I have not read any of his award-winning fiction. What I can unequivocally say is that both of the Joe Haldeman books I have read, Old Twentieth and The Accidental Time Machine, have been a delight.

There is a certain type of book that reminds me of the kind of science fiction novel that got me hooked on the genre in the first place. Whenever I happen upon that type of book, be it older science fiction or something recently written, I cannot help but enjoy the experience. The Accidental Time Machine fits that mold. While some may criticize this type of work as "sci fi lite" or "more of the same ol' schtick", I truly believe that it takes a great deal of skill to write the type of science fiction that has broad appeal, a page-turning plot, an appealing central character, and enough science and vision to keep the story grounded in a science fiction universe. The Accidental Time Machine delivers just that kind of engaging story.

The Accidental Time Machine tells the story of young Matthew Fuller, a semi-motivated MIT lab assistant whose recent creation, a caliber built for nothing resembling time travel, begins disappearing and reappearing for no apparent reason. A series of experiments leads Matt to discover that the machine stays gone for predictably longer periods of time. It is not long before Matt decides to include himself in the experiments. Not surprisigly this leads to the kind of difficulties that impel Matthew to continue pushing the reset button on the make-shift time machine, sending himself to ever greater distances into the future. As the future becomes ever stranger, and more dangerous, Matthew cannot help but believe that an incident in his past indicates that he himself found a way back in time. That way back is Matthew's only hope of delivery from a future that is nothing like the world he is from.

With The Accidental Time Machine Joe Haldeman has crafted a futuristic adventure story that is hard to put down. With each jump into the future the story becomes more interesting and more suspenseful for both Matthew Fuller and the reader. While scientific theory is certainly a part of the equation, Haldeman never diverts from the thrust of the story long enough to the alienate the reader with scientific mumbo-jumbo. Instead he weaves that into the story in such a way that it does not detract from the adventure in even the slightest way. Matthew Fuller is a very likeable, accessible everyman and as such is a very comfortable hero for the reader to journey with. Along the way he meets interesting characters and finds himself in interesting situations that compel the reader to keep turning pages.

For me the very best science fiction adventure stories include a little romance and Joe Haldeman delivers that in a way reminiscent of the relationship in Jack Finney's classic tale Time and Again. In fact there were more than a few similarities in these two stories that led me to feel a kinship between these tales. Do not misinterpret me to mean that one is a copy of the other. Joe Haldeman's tale certainly stands on its own, but I felt a sense of comfortable nostalgia reading this story that no doubt stems from my previous enjoyment of Finney's must-read classic.

Joe Haldeman's more recent tales may not be comparable to his earlier award-winning classics. I am no judge of that. If however these past two novels are lesser creations from a science fiction master, then it certainly makes me want to read his older stories as both Old Twentieth and The Accidental Time Machine are thoroughly enjoyable, well written tales. The Accidental Time Machine engages the reader with a journey that is both suspenseful and fantastical and along the way brings two very likeable characters together in a way that is most fulfilling for an old romantic like myself. Read it!

If you know Joe Halderman from The Forever War, you're bound to be disappointed by The Accidental Time Machine. That earlier book was novel, and considered implications of relativistic travel that I suspect most people had never thought of before, and used them beautifully in service of the plot. In this book, the main character stumbles across a time machine. Its operation is explained at basically the same level as a Star Trek "we've got to reverse the polarity of the neutron flux, captain!" His travels through time evoke H G Wells, and give Haldeman the opportunity for some light sociopolitical commentary (particularly, criticism of christian extremism). Oddly, Haldeman choses to include the old science fiction trope of the ignorant young woman who accompanies the protagonist. This has traditionally been a technique used by lazy authors as a vehicle for exposition, by having the main character or a scientist explain plot points to the ignorant and/or stupid woman. Haldeman has his beautiful, ignorant female character fall in love with his loser protagonist, of course, but it comes across as wish fulfillment and totally false. It may have been intended as a tribute to the low-grade science fiction of earlier eras, but if so I think it fails. The book is a light read and doesn't take much time, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Despite Haldeman's fairly overt belief structure (left-leaning), he weaves a helluva story. THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE doesn't disappoint. The yarn revolves around Matthew Fuller, who, while working on a physics project, discovers that he's unwittingly created a time machine. He doesn't know why, doesn't know how; he only knows that its functions appear to increase by a factor of twelve every time it's activated: it moves geographically by that factor, and forward in time by that factor. What makes Haldeman's writing enjoyable is that, like another favorite author of mine, Larry Niven, he creates a "simple" story and makes the scientific mumbo-jumbo very easy to grasp.

At any rate, Fuller ultimately discovers how to transport things with the time machine, and eventually takes the plunge -- he uses it on himself. Jumping several weeks into the future, his appearance causes a major traffic accident and gets him, as a result, into trouble with the law. Someone posts his million dollar(!) bail, though -- someone unknown to him. Matt deduces that, based on the man's description, it can only have been himself from the future! But -- his machine doesn't work that way! It only sends to the future, not the past! Einstein showed that time travel to the past can't work, anyhow!

Taking advantage of the timely bail, Matt uses his freedom to make use of the time machine again. This jump pushes him some 177 years forward, into a society that is decidedly backward compared to his own (which is the mid-21st century, by the way). Here's where Haldeman's lefty view comes into play: The northeast(!) coast of the United States has been taken over by a radical Christian organization that had actually fought a one-year war with most of the rest of the country. Most of the book centers on this time, and as such it's probably the weakest facet of the novel. (Maybe it's because I read too many Armageddon books this summer and am weary of reading about little-to-no technology societies who use strict religion to get by.) But it's here Matt meets the woman he'll literally spend close to forever with -- a suppressed innocent young woman who's been "drinking the Kool Aid," so to speak. But once Matt finally gets a chance to use the time machine again -- and jump almost over 2,000 years forward -- he inadvertently takes the woman (Martha) with him.

From here, the book really takes off as interests begin to compete for use of the time machine, and for how its ultimate resolution will play out. Haldeman keeps the story at a human level, and let's just say that his view of time is probably a among a minority in the science fiction realm. He essentially makes use of, for lack of a better term, a "closed loop" time geometry which for me was perfectly exemplified by the supremely awesome DC graphic novel SUPERMAN: RED SON.

This is kind of a departure for Haldeman, but I can't blame him; time travel stories are such fun to write, no matter which direction you're traveling. As a semi-trained scientist, though, and a present adjunct professor (of writing) at MIT, Haldeman hews to the more scientifically defensible position (at the moment) of not allowing travel back through time. All those paradoxes, you know. We're all traveling forward in time already -- at the rate of one second per second -- so that's what he deals with (although I have my own problems with the notion of a predestined future). It's 2053 and Matthew Fuller is a graduate assistant at MIT, working at not working on his Ph.D. in physics, when a chronon-measuring instrument he built himself goes wrong in a particularly unsettling way. Pressing the "Reset" button makes it jump forward in time a couple of seconds, and laterally a milimeter or two. The next time he presses the button, it jumps forward about twelve times as long (and sideways twelve times as far), and further button-presses proceed exponentially. Naturally, Matt recognizes that this is going to pile up time and distance pretty quickly, but since he's just lost his girl and his job on the same day, what the hell. Besides, he has visions of a Nobel Prize. Of course, things don't go at all smoothly, with both near and far future societies having developed in unexpected (and often unpleasant) ways. The appearance of Jesus doesn't help, either. Will Matt ever find a way to return to his own world from the far future? And what about Martha, his own theosophical graduate assistant? This is a fast read and a lot of fun, and the speculative physics is so well explained, you won't even have to bleep over it.

I am a fan of Haldeman, I think he has written a couple of great sci-fi works. When you pick up The Accidental Time Machine, what you will find right from the get go is a very seductive/readable style of prose that sucks the reader right in. I was hooked from the first couple of pages & over the first half of the novel was cheering Haldeman along, thinking "what a great little book".

However... The story here really falls apart at around the half way point. Hmmm... maybe the best way to describe what is so very wrong here is to compare this story to its forefather, the Time Machine by HG Wells. I think that both stories suffer from the same lack of imagination. In Wells' version, the protagonist travels through I dont know how many millennium only to land in a place where humans were essentially less evolved than we are today. I feel like the futures that Hadelman gives us are filled with these same ugly mocking images of ourselves right now. Not the advanced societies or evolved humans I bet will be there. I mean, common, journey 2400 years into the future and have a conversation with people you meet. No way.

so I guess what I am trying to say is that I was underwhelmed to the point where i would not recommend this to anyone. Even though I really enjoyed the first half. The future was just way to limited for any self respecting sci-fi'er.

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.

Just finished this book. I don't know what to think of it just yet. What I liked:

1) The characters - Matt, the protagonist, is interesting to watch and though maybe he's not as credible as I'd like (I just couldn't believe some of the choices he made or the motives behind those choices), he does evoke enough empathy for me to care about him and want to follow him on his adventures.

2) The humor and wit - this is a fun read. The language is fresh and clever. Quick example: "He put enough sugar and cream in the coffee to call it breakfast." I love that!

3) The premise - this is a giveaway. I like any time travel story. But, this was interesting in that the machine only works in one direction - forward. What would you do with a machine that only jumps forward exponentially in time? Stop after one jump or keep going forward in time with only the faintest bit of hope that you could go back? I already know what I would do, which is not at all what the protagonist in this story does.

4) The worlds Haldeman creates (and by "world" I mean future Earths)- what amazes me the most in sci-fi and fantasy stories is the sheer creativity involved in imagining up a world that doesn't exist, and Haldeman's worlds are interesting. They do have a slight manufactured feel to them, or maybe just an under-developed feel. They're not as wholly engrossing as I would have liked. We get enough of each world to understand it, but not to fully appreciate it. I think part of the reason is that this book as it is is too small for such an awesome idea. It could be another hundred pages, and I think Haldeman is talented enough to fill those new pages with the same quick-paced, entertaining and thought-provoking writing as the rest of the book.

What troubled me:

1) The science - It wasn't easy, and I felt that not understanding it hampered my understanding of the plot as a whole. There were some passages that I read over and over (and over and over and over) just trying to understand. Maybe it's just me (and for my ego's sake, I hope it's not), but I don't think Haldeman broke down the science enough. After posting this I intend to immediately scour the internet looking for some explanations.

Overall, what I liked about this book outnumber what I didn't like (although point #4 is kind of mixed), so I recommend it. And if you followed the science, then kudos to you. Now please explain it to me...

Matthew Fuller is a research assistant at MIT, working too many hours without enough sleep. One day, while building a calibrator to measure quantum effects, his machine disappears. Almost before he fully comprehends it, the machine reappears. The next time it happens, it is gone for a dozen seconds. Eventually he figures out that his machine is traveling through time. When he tries to use it to transport himself, he arrives several weeks in the future, wanted by the police for grand theft and murder. In order to save his skin, he jumps ahead again. Eventually, he ends up far, far in the future, beyond the lives of anyone he knew. Can he find a new home, or possibly a way back to his own time?

The future worlds described here are interesting extrapolations of human behavior and technology, but are increasingly unrecognizable to anything within our realm of experience. Haldeman's time travel certainly seems credible, and his futures present unique challenges for his characters as the leap ever further from their own times. An entertaining story, with plenty of philosophical meat to chew on.

Always a huge fan of time travel/alternate universe stories, I was bound to pick up Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine at some point. Believing it would be a lighthearted look at time travel, I was a bit surprised by how far my expectations were off, and how disappointing the book was.

Matt is a lab assistant at MIT in the near future who accidentally creates a time machine when building some sort of graviton spectrometer. Finding that the machine jumps forward and only forward in time in progressively longer interims, Matt decides to hop aboard himself and check it out. Feeling threatened at future stops, he continues to fling himself forward ever farther in time. Eventually, about 200 years after the story begins, he winds up in a sort of post-apocalyptic theocracy where he meets Martha, the obligatory eventual love interest. As they jumps take him father and farther ahead in time, the different earths he explores are fairly boring. For what is a short novel, it would have been nicer to get more a sense of these worlds before leaping to the next.

The theocracy I described takes place after the second coming of Jesus, and there are religious themes throughout the book. Unfortunately, the religious angle isn't played up enough for my tastes, and the evolution of Martha's character is fairly unbelievable when one considers that she has grown up in a sheltered world full of old time religion.

Haldeman relies on the standard third person narration here, but with the entire novel being told from matt's perspective, I wonder why he didn't go the first person route. I think the humor would have worked better, and it just might have made things more exciting to experience them through his eyes rather than just being told through the narration. Perhaps this is just an inherent bias with me; I tend to prefer first person narration above all others.

Matt really wants to return home, so the basic quest is the search for a time machine that allows one to travel back in time. He keeps jumping to the future in order to find someone who can help him build one of it doesn't exist already, and when he finally does discover a way back no real explanation besides `you don't have the worldview to begin to understand the math' is given. I'm not some big tech head who has to know how everything works, but why write a book about time travel and go light on the mechanics?

All in all, a fair book that was more entertaining than not. The Accidental Time Machine isn't up to the standards set by Haldeman's The Forever War, not even close. But it was nice to read a little more of one of the most respected SF writers. I may have to go with a more traditional military SF novel by him sometime next year.

Haldeman's time travel novel really doesn't offer much in the way of originality, but then again, I'm not sure how many possibilities are left in the realm of time travel. You're bound to see a "present," followed be either a revision of the past or a speculation on the future.

In the near future, a student at MIT stumbles on a time travel device that propels itself into the future at exponential intervals. When he decides it is time to try the machine out, however, he finds the future holds more problems than solutions. Haldeman does offer some interesting takes on the possible progression of our world, including a future where the Messiah has returned (but with a twist, of course), but what I mostly got out of this novel was a blend of Philip Dick and H. G. Wells, not in prose, but in plot development.

The thing that sold me on this, is that the novel is relatively light-hearted and reads very quickly. At no point did I feel like I was being dragged through irrelevant character interaction, or wading through a work of fiction some high brow physics professor has attempted. Instead, Haldeman blends subtle romance, humor, and action to tell a simple, feel-good story.

Simply put: a notch above trash fiction, but definitely below ground-breaking literary work.

Another great story from great author.
The story is a bit similar to Long Earth Mars or Long Utopia (from Long Earth Series), or to The Time Ships (A sequel to The Time Machine).

I liked main character and later introduced second one, and was really interested what is going on.
The last part with post-human being time machine by themselves, and final solution, could be better however.

But overall I can really recommend this book.

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.

A novel that almost becomes a story; A 3 star rating that doesn't quite make it to 4.

I picked this one because the premise intrigued me. "Things are going nowhere for lowly MIT research assistant Matt Fuller - especially not after his girlfriend drops him for another man. But then while working late one night, he inadvertently stumbles upon what may be the greatest scientific breakthrough ever. His luck, however, runs out when he finds himself wanted for murder - in the future."

The book doesn't waste any time getting to the discovery of the time machine or the conflict created by the murder accusation. At first I really appreciated this about the novel. Matt makes a discovery and true to a scientist's form he begins testing it. I was drawn in by his curiosity and I wanted to see what would happen.

Then his curiosity leads him to create a bigger test, the end result of which is a wrong place wrong time (no pun intended) scenario that made it look like he killed someone. At that point there was good tension and I wanted to see how it would be resolved as well.

But that's where the book started to let me down. The time machine essentially becomes just an easy way for him to escape. It was a let down, particularly when he lands in the future in a very ho-hum existence. The main tension there seems to be that between a dull comfortable life and the knowledge that he can escape it with the press of a button. Whoopdidoo.

The pattern of easy escape continues through a couple more episodes. I say episodes because the tension and attention to them is not quite full enough to call them adventures. Along the way Matt picks up a girl, so to speak, and she (Martha) somewhat easily becomes convinced that her whole system of beliefs is bogus; therefore, she would rather stay with him than return to her own time and place. That was particularly convenient. Their relationship is cute enough not to be completely irritating and undeveloped enough to be superficial.

Eventually, Matt picks up a powerful being who does not have the best of intentions for him and that has the potential for some tension or conflict. But . . . and you'll love this . . . the being is easily sent on its way by some just slightly more powerful beings from somewhere in time. The bad gal dispatched, the love interest no longer interested in her own time, the new powerful being with the ability to send them back in time, and we have the makings of a happy, if somewhat convenient, ending.

The end itself comes in a summary fashion. We are shown that the happy couple both have successful careers and a whole mess of well-adjusted and successful children.

If you're looking for something to listen to while you drive (as I was) or a beach book, then this is a decent fit. It is light on science, character, plot, tension, and theme. That said, it has just enough interesting bits to keep you reading/listening. I did, but I also came away with a ho-hum feeling.

If you're a fan of science-fiction, with a side of fantasy and romance, I would highly recommend this for you. Haldeman does a nice job of introducing the basis of the story very quickly, and wastes no time diving right in, developing the main character, Matt, a MIT doctoral student, along the way. Sticking to mostly simple scientific explanations, the author guides you through Matt's adventures forward in time, and manages to keep the story light, and uncomplicated.

As a fan of science-fiction, I could have gone with a little more character development, and perhaps a bit more substance in the story and some of the science (fiction) behind Haldeman's ideas surrounding why the machine worked the way it did ... but, I enjoy a little more meat! While I wouldn't give t a huge "wow" factor, there is a nice subtle twist at the end.

Overall, a great read, and while I wouldn't say I'm an exceptionally fast reader, I flew through this one, as it read like a movie to some degree. I will probably check into some of Haldeman's other novels as a result ... nicely done.

Enjoyable, yes, but alas, also forgettable.

I became a Joe Haldeman fan when I read CAMOUFLAGE. I'm not sure I would have selected it for a Nebula Award because it did suffer from a few shortcomings, such as an abrupt conclusion. But the premise was innovative and kept me charging through the pages.

THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE sounded like another great ride, and I was eager to gorge myself on it also. Well, in a nutshell, CAMOUFLAGE was the better novel, in my opinion, but THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE is a fun, lightweight piece of sci-fi.

The plot follows a young MIT research assistant, Matt, as he discovers that the "calibrator" he's assembled is wont to disappear...and then pop back into existence. He soon determines a periodicity to the phenomenon as well as how to initiate it. Matt decides to become his own guinea pig, and is soon touching down in time, at ever-longer intervals. Each time, he encounters new reasons to push the time-jumping button again.

My least favorite excursion was to Jesus-cult Boston. But Matt does meet Martha there, and she becomes a sweet addition to Matt's itinerant life. I enjoyed the progression of her relationship with Matt, although I think they could have done without the visual aids when she got curious about sex.

Like CAMOUFLAGE, THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE could have been written with more depth. I wished for further exploration of some of Matt's touchdown locales. And the mysterious figures who guide Matt and Martha for a while aren't developed to the degree they might have been.

I'm also discombobulated that the fact checkers seem to have fallen down on the job: Matt supposedly time travels through 39 days and some-odd hours at one juncture. We're told he arrives back on February 2. We're also told he left December 14 of the previous year. You do the math. Unless the calendar in Matt's reality has changed in some unreported manner, Matt should have come back in January. Why wasn't this caught or explained?

One other perhaps inconsequential note: a real Matt Nagle just passed away last month. He, like the Matt in THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE, was 27. And he hailed from the Boston area. He had acquired a measure of fame for bravely permitting neuroscientists to experiment on him by placing a chip in his brain after he was paralyzed from the shoulders down. Upon finishing this work, I wondered whether Haldeman wished to honor him by naming a scientifically adventurous character after this real pioneer....

THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE is sci-fi cotton candy, if you will. It's a nice way to while away a little time, but it melts quickly in your mind.
I rate it closer to three and a half stars than to four, but I'm still a steadfast Haldeman fan and await his next novel.

Apparently most of the reviewers here think they are a book review critic and think they have to tell retell the whole book in their review. YOU ARE NOT A REVIEW CRITIC. All this is for is to tell whether you LIKED the book or you DIDN'T like the book and why? This IS NOT the place to summarize the whole book!!!

As far as I'm concerned, this is an interesting book, but nothing paradigm shifting. It's basically a rehash of an old Star Trek Original Series episode, just that the names of the antagonist(s) have been changed. I'm not going to tell you which episode this is a rehash of because unlike OTHER people, I'm not going to TELL you ALL of what the book IS ABOUT! So, far from being book from an original science fiction thinker, it's just a rehash of an old Star Trek Original Series rehash. Also, I don't like the anti Christian sentiment of the book either. In reality it would be the socialists who would do, and actually HAVE done in recent history, what he is saying the "conservative Christians" in the book are doing. But Joe is a liberal atheists, obviously, and believes the propaganda liberals and atheists have made up about Christians AND about themselves. But I will give it this, it does have some interesting twists and conundrums, as most time machine stories do. And I don't like the

MIT laboratory assistant Matthew invents the calibrator, a gizmo that enables a person to travel forward in time; however, there is no going back as his machine only works one way. He tests it for a twenty minute jaunt. However, having lost his girlfriend Kara and his job, a distraught Matthew decides to test his machine after calculating the exponential increasing jumps in time. He leaps forward two weeks into the future only to learn he is a person of interest by the police in a homicide that occurred when he stole a car just before he jumped; apparently the vehicle owner dropped dead when Matt and his auto vanished into thin air.

Knowing he needs to escape, he leaps forward in time, but he learns that each leap is that much longer than the previous one. This time he jumps forward two decades where he learns his device has been found and everyone is waiting for him to reappear when he does. Matthew is a hero and joins MIT. Although the world has dramatically changed while he leaped and his knowledge of physics obsolete, no one has been able to copy his time machine. Now pressure is on him by those who want to use his device so he leaps again two centuries into the future where he seeks a respite knowing that if this fails him the next jump gets into the millennium and there is no reverse.

This terrific science fiction time travel tale feels like a throw back thriller starring a disingenuous antihero struggling with fame as his gizmo works but no one including Matt has been able to replicate what he wrought. Every time the pressure mounts on Matt he leaps, but with the time interval expanding, he knows each subsequent jump is into an unknown future. He learns that with the twenty year leap that prevalent acceptable physics theory were devastated in the interim. Joe Haldeman shows why he is a national treasure with this tremendous thought provoking thriller.

Harriet Klausner

I just finished this book, and I couldn't put it down! Now, if Mr. Haldeman would just get on with INVENTING the time machine that would let me go back a couple of days and read this book again without knowing what will happen...

Truly outstanding! The book defies what authors are "supposed to write." That is, it is a very plot driven story, with minimal character traits to start with. Nevertheless, the Matthew and Martha characters grow quietly and subtly until you really start to follow them. Rather than the first 5 pages consisting of all the characters, their faults and motivations, their introspection and navel gazing, this book starts with a situation. We start with a mysteriously disappearing machine. We deal with events, with plot. Only through the events do the characters come into focus. This is a refreshing change from the contrived way that most novels today develop.

I hope Neil Gaiman reads this one. I think he'll appreciate it!

The Accidental Time Machine is a reasonably good science fiction adventure that suffers at times from being a bit uninspired. Let me first say that I only dip my toes in the water of science fiction. I prefer to stay grounded in reality or something resembling reality in most of my reading.

As the title suggests, a student accidentally discovers time travel. However, he can only move forward and each time he does, he makes a bigger jump. At first, he simply experiments with the device, but after a jump of 6 days, he winds up in jail, and is forced by circumstances to make another jump to save himself.

The plot is every bit as good as advertised. It's fast paced and doesn't linger too long in one scene. However, the characters are a bit dull and lifeless. In a good book, the reader can put him or herself in the shoes of the characters and experience the story with them. I just found it was hard to relate to the people in this book. After a hopeful start, I merely found this average reading.

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.

I'm glad I read the excellent "Forever War" a few years ago, because if "The Accidental Time Machine" were the first Haldeman book I read, I wouldn't read any more.

This book starts out well with interesting characters and settings and relationships and ex-relationships, but then it quickly becomes very shallow and eventually becomes so lacking of any depth, it's more like a child's comic book than a novel. Some of the ideas are interesting, but I was going nuts trying to understand some of the logic involved in the time loops and avoidance of paradoxes. Finally, I just gave up trying to understand and just read quickly to get to the end.

Time travel stories are always fun, though, so as long as you don't expect anything more than a light read without anything meaningful, you'll enjoy this book.

Despite what other reviews may suggest, this isn't "The Forever War" or "Mindbridge." This is a good yarn, well told, that doesn't really bring much that's new to the time travel genre, other than an apparently one-way time machine. Haldeman writes very well, better here than in his earlier works. But good writing can't disguise a relatively thin set of ideas and a deux ex machina plot resolution. There's a strong flavor of homage to H.G. Wells, but even that touch is a bit disappointing. There are some smiles: an MIT instructor making the City of Los Angeles a villain, for example.

As always, he compresses the ending into a kind of coda, not even a real epilogue. It's a Haldeman touch, and I've never liked it. All of these world-shattering events happen in the last few pages. It makes the very human events that are detailed in the preceding couple of hundred pages seem nearly irrelevant. Several authors do it now, and for me it always feels like I've been short-changed.

I like Joe Haldeman's work and own most of his novels and short story collections. This is yeoman work, not the electrifying stuff he sometimes turns out. It's worth your time, but it won't blow you away.

...but it just lost its steam as it went along.
I love time travel stories and I love stories involving characters that discover new technology and this novel had all the earmarks of being both of those rolled into an entertaining read. But as the rather non-emotional main character hurtles through time my connection to him begins to lose its tether. I found the situations he finds himself increasingly uninspired and unrealistic. And then there is the ending which feels so rushed that I figured Mr. Haldeman either ran out of time himself or simply paper. For a novel that had such great promise and had me rushing to turn the page the end left me totally disappointed and unsatisfied.

Spoiler alert, although only the first 74 pages of 260.

This book had real potential...loser grad student loses everything and then gambles it all on time travel, is immediately arrested on murder charges, manages to escape, gets caught in a sticky love situation...and I won't say anything more. If the rest of the book had stayed at the same level as the beginning, this would have been a great read. Unfortunately, it became very superficial and light, with flat characters and non-engaging problems solved in overly simplified ways.

I have listened to the audiobook version three times now and enjoyed it more each time. The combination of plausible technology combined with conjectural quantum physics is a perfect premise for this entertaining flight through time - with strings attached, of course - and is consistently imaginative and unpredictable at every turn.

PS: My favorite JH book is still All My Sins Remembered, for its exciting and empathetic depiction of the definitive puppet [again with the strings!] who pays the ultimate price for being the best man for any job. I wish someone like Joe Flanigan [from Stargate Atlantis] would record that one.

Having read all of JH's work, this is not his strongest book. The characters seemed flat and the writing somewhat pedestrian. Having said that, it is still better than 90% of the fiction out there, and a fun read, particularly if you know the locale in which it is set--Cambridge. The speculation as to future Earths, always difficult in the time travel genre, were interesting and as believable as any other speculations. I have to laugh, however, at some of the reviewers who complain, for example, that Hadleman did not do enough research about Christians because no Christian would believe that Jesus would first visit the President? Huh? These are the people that believe the Earth is 7,000 years old, men rode dinosaurs, the Bible is literally true, Jesus will fly down from the sky, and an all powerful being influences the outcome of sporting events. The entire concept of faith is the antithesis of reason and evidence, so what was Hadleman supposed to have researched--how many angels on the head of a pin? There is a long history of reason, science, and rationality in science fiction, e.g., Asimov, Clarke, and many others, and Hadleman thankfully continues that trend. The Christians, Muslims, Mormons, etc. have their books of speculative fiction, let those of us who value reason and science have ours.

While reading this book I began to wonder whether Joe had planned this to be a 'young adult' novella? There are enough blank pages in this book to write another novel, and the printing and spacing is such to maximize the size of the novel. The story itself is nothing new and in many cases reads like H.G.Wells' or one of his contemporaries.

The science is plausible but gets bogged down in technospeak to the point it is incomprehensible to the other characters. Sadly, Joe even writes a postscript to pat himself on the back for his use of 'gravitons' for the basis of his time travel because some scientists have published a paper that uses this as a basis for time-travel (woo hoo!). Though he explains the reason for the exponential time dilation (like that!), the "grey time" between jumps, never increases after the third jump, as if Joe forgot about that part of the equation. Granted that increasing the grey time would have ended the ability to time travel, there has to be a symmetry to the science.

The story that follows the last couple of time jumps is so childish to be a parody of itself. Turning the AI 'La' into an evil cousin of 'HAL' was about as lame an idea that I could imagine, and that the "couple" in the book are sent 'back to the future' of an earlier time (by some descendants of theirs) is way too hokey.

Poor job by a well thought of author, better you should read "Forever War".

I have read very few science fiction novels, preferring short fiction or non-fiction, but I can't resist time travel reading! This book was much better than I had even hoped. Mostly by accident, Matt gets control of a strange time machine---every time you use it, it takes you further into the future and further away from where it was first used. He jumps into the future many times, finding many types of societies and conditions on Earth, and along the way finds romance too. The ending made me so happy---I love ending that really tell what happened next! I do admit there were strange characters and perhaps some plot oddities, but I still give this book five stars because these didn't bother me at all---I loved reading the book, felt eager to hear what happened next and have a fairly light knowledge of physics, so mistakes in that area wouldn't bother me! I would recommend the book to any lover of time travel reading.

Three and a half stars, I'd say.

As the title suggests, The Accidental Time Machine is a time-travel story. It follows the adventures of Matt, a physics graduate assistant at MIT who builds an innocuous piece of equipment that (guess what?) accidentally works as a time machine. The machine, however, is limited. It can only move forward in time, and each time it does, the length of the jump increases by approximately a factor of 12: the first jump lasts a little over a second, the next 15 seconds, then three minutes, half an hour, and before long, decades and millennia. Moreover, the machine is a fluke. No one knows how it works, or how to duplicate it.

Matt at first tries to figure out the machine on his own, but eventually uses it to escape into the future. Each stop is fairly brief, no more than a few days, just long enough for Matt to feel threatened and move on. He keeps moving forward, hoping to reach a time when backwards time travel is possible so he can return home.

Time travel is a familiar road, and it's hard to be completely original. Matt's first stops are reminiscent of H. G. Wells' classic novel. He even picks up his own Weena: Martha, a religious innocent who becomes his travel companion. As the jumps stretch farther into the future, the story more resembles Vernor Vinge's Realtime. Humans have, for the most part, moved on, and the world seems an empty place.

Haldeman's intent is different than Wells or Vinge, however. The tone is much lighter, often humorous, the pace quicker, the danger less threatening. Matt doesn't seem too perturbed by his situation, or overly curious about the changes around him. He just continues his plucky way forward. We get just a taste of the future at each stop, like sightseers on a tour bus. I would have liked more. And Haldeman doesn't delve too deeply into the physics or paradoxes of time travel, just enough to keep the story moving.

The verdict? The Accidental Time Machine is fine, a pleasant story that is entertaining enough. It is a quick read, only 270 pages of well-spaced print. It's not Haldeman's best work, and it's not Hugo caliber, but it is enjoyable. Mostly Harmless, as Douglas Adams would say. It's probably not worth hardback prices, though; wait for the paperback.

It's been a while since I was tempted to keep reading a book all night because the story was so engaging. Joe Haldeman's Accidental Time Machine almost ruined a good night's sleep, but as I have a 9-5 job, I was forced to resist the temptation.
What a great story! Mr. Haldeman immediately grabs the reader with a tale of a small machine - built by a physics grad student at MIT - that can leap ever-increasing distances into the future, and then it returns to the present. How the student figures out how to ride along and then deals with unexpected outcomes is only part of the reason this book is so hard to put down. Another is the fascinating characters the student meets along the way. And also some surprising plot twists.
My hat's off to Joe Haldeman for writing one of the best stories I've ever read (and I've been reading for nearly sixty years!).
Bravo!

This is one of the best time travel tales I've read. Once you buy in to the premise, the story takes off and proceeds at a fast pace with plenty of twists and turns. Great character development too where we see our protagonist grow up as time moves along (in more ways than one).

Surprise. I normally review books on actual and not fictional technology, but I came across the hardcopy version of this book at my local library and, having not read a Haldeman novel in a couple of decades, decided to revisit science fiction as one might revisit an old girlfriend. I wanted to see how much my interest in the genre and specifically Haldeman's writing, had held up over time. I'm also kind of a sucker for time travel stories.

It is a page turner. I reserved the novel as something to "wind down" with before going to bed and there were a few nights when I pushed my "reasonable consciousness" envelope by reading longer than I had intended. The beginning of the book introduces a mystery discovered by protagonist Matt Fuller, an MIT graduate student in the more or less near future. Watching Matt try to figure out how a simple piece of lab equipment he'd built had somehow developed the ability to move forward in time was a definite hook for me. He's a bright, but not brilliant underachiever who's given the opportunity for "greatness", but only if he keeps his discovery a secret. This means he must go the way of so many other "mad scientists" by using himself as the primary experimental subject.

Each push of the button sends Matt further into the future in a geometric progression and Matt ends up about 15 years into his own future feeling more useless than in his own time. Hailed as a glorified lab rat and with his Professor taking all the credit for discovering this method of time travel, Matt eventually escapes the dead end of this existence by "stealing" the time machine (it was MIT property after all) and continuing to launch himself further forward in time.

Unfortunately, once Matt leaves a future history that's any where near familiar to him (or the reader), the novel begins to fall apart. It is still quite readable, but Haldeman's social commentary becomes glaringly apparent. In this next jump, Matt encounters a future where "Christers" (Christians) have taken over the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. after the supposed return of Jesus. Haldeman is sadly transparent in portraying Christians (and probably all people of faith) as either conniving schemers, buffoons, or innocent pawns. I was hoping that Matt's encounter with the lovely and truly faithful Martha would have some sort of impact on his own state of faith (or lack thereof, since Matt is a self-declared Jewish atheist), but such is not the case. Haldeman uses this part of the book to make his case that any truly intelligent person will depend solely on scientific observation to explore and discover the universe, and that faith is merely surrendering to superstition.

As a person of faith reading Haldeman's rendition of life "post-return" of Jesus, I had to determine that either he didn't do his Biblical homework, or he was making a point that Bible-believers will disregard what "the Word" actually says for a hand full of technologically generated miracles. The "faithful" in the Massachusetts of the 23rd Century blithely return to a world of a medieval religious rule with futuristic technology reserved for the ruling class. No Christian I know would have considered Jesus dropping in on the President of the United States as his first port of call to be even remotely valid, but somehow Haldeman portrays this as not a problem for the "elect". A rather simplistic view of people of faith which was one of the most disappointing parts of the book. I guess the author never met a believer that had a brain and perhaps the Scarecrow in the "Wizard of Oz" was the archetypal Christian, but I digress.

It seems that Haldeman's pet peeves aren't reserved for Christianity though, in that Matt's next jump, some thousands of years into the future beyond the "Christers", takes him into a world where global society is based on eBay. A heroic but hapless Martha saves Matt's life while he's trying to escape her point in history, but at the cost of joining him on his journey into the future. While Matt confirms his understanding that Christ's return was a sham (it's now in the history books) put on by the government (talk about lack of separation between church and state), Martha, who manages to hold on to her faith for some time, eventually watches it crumble to dust as their journey forward through time continues.

Matt and Martha do encounter a "savior" of a sort, both in their dreams and during each jump forward in time as they become unwitting victims of an artificial intelligence who needs Matt to help her (yes, it's a gendered intelligence) escape the boredom of running the "eBay society". For some mysterious reason (which is never revealed), this intelligence believes that seeking the ultimate end of the universe is the answer to a "life" of governing a bunch of wealthy but mentally vacant shopping drones.

I could say that the book becomes less and less plausible from there, but when predicting the future, how can you say what will or won't happen? Matt struggles with his liberal ideals, especially towards women. On the one hand, he ends up explaining the various sexist aspects of the Bible to Martha and, on the other hand, arguing with himself about whether he should seduce the lovely and virginal Martha, or "act like a man" and protect her from the surrounding dangers, which includes himself.

The book has a happy ending of sorts. Matt and Martha are rescued, both from their virtual captor and from forward time traveling, and given a choice of returning to a specific place or a specific time, not both. Without blatantly revealing the ending, Matt discovers several things (but not how time travel actually works). He does discover that he really loves Martha and treats her honorably, ultimately marrying her. He also discovers his "niche" if you will, by becoming a brilliant scientist, but only in the past. It's a little easier to be, or at least seem brilliant, if you know what scientific discoveries are about to be made.

Martha discovers more, but for me, one discovery was sad. She loses her faith, but does fall in love and marry Matt. I suppose never seeing the return of Christ (or the coming of the Messiah, from Matt's perspective) would have to lead to the conclusion that the Bible, both Christian and Jewish, is just a collection of morality tales, not much different than the novel I'm reviewing. Martha leaves Christ behind and earns a degree in one of the sciences before "settling down" and having babies. Matt considers this an achievement far greater than his own. He achieves "greatness" by virtue of using what any 21st century physics grad student would know in a past where that knowledge was just on the cusp of being discovered. Matt (and thus Haldeman) considers Martha earning an undergraduate degree more significant, because he had to leave the fantasy of her faith behind to do it. Are education and faith truly mutually exclusive?

The young couple finally take the one piece of advice Matt's father ever gave him, which was to "play the cards you're dealt". Sans time machine, Matt and Martha make a life for themselves in the time and place they were sent to by their saviors from the far future. At this point, domestic bliss is almost irrelevant and the next several decades are described in mere paragraphs. This unhappily bypasses the opportunity for both Matt and Martha to narrate their impressions on a history that the audience would have either lived through (the 20th century) or at least have heard about from their parents (or people like me). It could have been the most significant part of the novel but Haldeman treats it as an afterthought.

The ending is ultimately unsatisfying to me. While Matt and Martha happily set up their household and family at some point in the near (historically speaking) past, their fate is as much accidental as anything else in this tale. The novel seems to reveal a certain truth about secularist and atheist thought; that life is random and ultimately meaningless. You end up where you end up, live, breathe, work, have babies, and then die without a point. There really are no lessons learned unless you take into consideration that a mediocre mid-21st century MIT grad student finds his purpose only by going into the past where foreknowledge makes him seem "cutting edge". Aren't we all like that though, at least in our fantasies? Who hasn't said to themselves, "If only I could go back with what I know now..."

Sorry, Mr. Haldeman. This is a nice little piece of fantasy with liberal (politically and otherwise) amounts of personal and social commentary, but not your best work. Of course, if I re-read The Forever War after so long, would I be as disappointed?

Originally published at the A Million Chimpanzees blog:
[...]

I read the book in one sitting, took about two hours. I found smooth prose, likable characters, fun science, interesting notions about the future, and a story not written in first person! Plus, the synopsis on the back cover barely reveals the plot, which is so rare nowadays. In a broad way, I found the story very similar to Being John Malkovich, in that it unexpectedly continued in a fun, logical manner.

The highest praise I can offer is that this book made me look forward to exploring Haldeman's other books.

This book was a little different tha your avergae time travel novel. It's pace was fast at times and then slowed down. It never really slows down to the point of becoming boring but it was well written with technical details and some form of wanting you to know how this all happens. Character development is good as we become pretty familiar with the main character and his thinking. The various times that the character travels through are pretty interesting. So much so that I would like to see some stories written in them specifically just to expand upon the them! I was particularly interested in the Post Apocalyptic/Religious zealot time period. Anyway, I found it hard to put down even though it was not my favorite time travel novel. A good read and woth the purchase.

I read the Kindle version of this book. I thought it was pretty good, but it could have been better. The storyline was interesting and the concept was great. It lacked the emotional depth that it could have had, though. There were lots of moments where the author could have gone into what the character was a going through a bit more, especially in the relationship with his female companion. The climax between those two never really gets explored.

I thought it was a good, quick read. Worth picking up if you're into the time travel stuff.

I would like to have known before buying the book that while the first part of the book and the ending were quite intriguing,the middle of the book was a little thin in places.

However, the writer does does an excellent job of presenting the main character in the settings he encounters. (His descriptions are such that you can see and even feel the environments in your mind's eye.)

The hero has a bit of the flavor of the hero in "By His Bootstraps".

The book has a few issues never quite resolved,at least to my satisfaction,like who really was the character identified by the locals as Jesus and what was his agenda? Who really paid the hero's bail and how did he accomplish getting into the correct time period to do so? Why did the hero's time machine work but copies didn't? (The reason was hinted at but never verified as a surety.)

A good book for pure escape.

This novel started out as a promising, light-hearted adventure, but when the story really took off, it didn't seem to have anywhere to go. First, we get an awkward exploration of the near-future, which the protagonist escaped on the flimsiest of pretexts. From there, we land in the "meat" of the story, which turns out to be a overly long, shallow, point-and-laugh criticism of religion. To wrap it all up, he throws in a malevolent AI, a confusing deus ex machina, and a "romance" that is really nothing more than lust and curiosity. In the end, it felt like Haldeman had a bunch of unrelated (and rather uninspired) ideas about the future, and invented a vehicle to throw them all together and call it a novel.

The Nebula-nominated "Accidental Time Machine" is a fun, quick read that I started at 2am and finished at 5am. It's a terrible cure for insomnia, but immensely entertaining and action-packed. It starts off normal enough, with a time machine that can only go forward, but as the jumps become larger the book takes some bizarre twists. Some readers have noted that it doesn't have the levity of, say, "The Forever War," and that's true: It feels more like a Piers Anthony speculative romp, with the best zero-gravity hand-job scene ever.

I've always like Time Travel books, but the exponential nature of this book really appeal to my math mind as well. It was really interesting how he worked in the leaps, bigger leaps, and even bigger leaps in time.

The book seemed to have bogged down a bit during the "un-Enlightenment" period the time traveler finds himself in, but eventually it picks up again. Some humor, some romance, but overall simply a genuinely interesting book - enough that I decided I'd like to read some more from Joe Haldeman (starting with The Forever War).

How do you criticize the end of a book without giving it away? The ending felt rushed. There was one major issue that was left completely un-addressed in the interest of a contrived "happily ever after". The story is still compelling, and evokes the big questions of identity that other successful time travel stories do.

Joe Haldeman, winner of many awards including HUGO and NEBULA, tells us his travel tale in THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE. You can not go wrong with Haldeman or this novel. It is a fun tale about accidently jumping to the future, and farther and farther into the future. I thoroughly enjoyed this simple tale, not technical, just fun. Highly Recommended.

I would like to have known before buying the book that while the first part of the book and the ending were quite intriguing,the middle of the book was a little thin in places.

However, the writer does does an excellent job of presenting the main character in the settings he encounters. (His descriptions are such that you can see and even feel the environments in your mind's eye.)

The hero has a bit of the flavor of the hero in "By His Bootstraps".

The book has a few issues never quite resolved,at least to my satisfaction,like who really was the character identified by the locals as Jesus and what was his agenda? Who really paid the hero's bail and how did he accomplish getting into the correct time period to do so? Why did the hero's time machine work but copies didn't? (The reason was hinted at but never verified as a surety.)

A good book for pure escape.

This novel started out as a promising, light-hearted adventure, but when the story really took off, it didn't seem to have anywhere to go. First, we get an awkward exploration of the near-future, which the protagonist escaped on the flimsiest of pretexts. From there, we land in the "meat" of the story, which turns out to be a overly long, shallow, point-and-laugh criticism of religion. To wrap it all up, he throws in a malevolent AI, a confusing deus ex machina, and a "romance" that is really nothing more than lust and curiosity. In the end, it felt like Haldeman had a bunch of unrelated (and rather uninspired) ideas about the future, and invented a vehicle to throw them all together and call it a novel.

The Nebula-nominated "Accidental Time Machine" is a fun, quick read that I started at 2am and finished at 5am. It's a terrible cure for insomnia, but immensely entertaining and action-packed. It starts off normal enough, with a time machine that can only go forward, but as the jumps become larger the book takes some bizarre twists. Some readers have noted that it doesn't have the levity of, say, "The Forever War," and that's true: It feels more like a Piers Anthony speculative romp, with the best zero-gravity hand-job scene ever.

I've always like Time Travel books, but the exponential nature of this book really appeal to my math mind as well. It was really interesting how he worked in the leaps, bigger leaps, and even bigger leaps in time.

The book seemed to have bogged down a bit during the "un-Enlightenment" period the time traveler finds himself in, but eventually it picks up again. Some humor, some romance, but overall simply a genuinely interesting book - enough that I decided I'd like to read some more from Joe Haldeman (starting with The Forever War).

How do you criticize the end of a book without giving it away? The ending felt rushed. There was one major issue that was left completely un-addressed in the interest of a contrived "happily ever after". The story is still compelling, and evokes the big questions of identity that other successful time travel stories do.

Joe Haldeman, winner of many awards including HUGO and NEBULA, tells us his travel tale in THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE. You can not go wrong with Haldeman or this novel. It is a fun tale about accidently jumping to the future, and farther and farther into the future. I thoroughly enjoyed this simple tale, not technical, just fun. Highly Recommended.

All in all, this was an okay novel, but personally I found it really disappointing. After reading The Forever War, I was so impressed by it that I figured I had to read more of Haldeman's books. Unfortunately, after this one, I'm pretty sure I'm done.

One of the first things you realize in the book is just how uninspired and almost rushed it seems (look no further than the title). In the beginning you don't mind it much, since most books take some time to come together, but this one just never gets there. All of the characters are pretty bland, the story changes settings and topics so fast that you never get a real feel for the characters, or develop a feeling of concern for them, and in general it just seems like Haldeman put as little effort in as he needed to to get the story published. Even most of the future settings that could have had great potential were just briefly touched on before being left behind.

Aside from the character and setting problems, the whole thing suffers from some serious plot issues. The last sixty pages or so feel like they were just thrown on to bring the story to the quickest, least-detailed ending possible, and by the time it was all over, I couldn't believe there wasn't more.

I really wanted to like this book from the beginning, and I can't deny that it was entertaining enough to keep me reading to the end. However, it doesn't win any of my personal accolades, and at the end of the day, even the survival of a grade school math error on page 102 (177 + 15 + 1 = 293???) makes you wonder if this book was ever meant to be anything but a cash cow.

I absolutely love a good time travel story. But I also realize that it is very difficult to write a good one that is believable and somewhat plausable. This story meets all of those criteria. It is also a nice feel good story. if you like sci-fi and time travel this one is for you.

Of all the plot devices in the history of literature, it may be, it just may be, that having advanced time travelers choosing to make contact with an atheist non-practicing Jew by assuming the form of Jesus, is the stupidest one ever conceived. I was worried for a while that this would turn into a piece of religious crud on the level of Left Behind, but fortunately at least he turned out to not actually be Jesus, speaking to them across the depths of time and space, but indeed an advanced time traveler.

This book also employs my absolute most detested type of ending (spoiler warning - skip the rest of this paragraph if you actually want to read this book after reading my words of disgust). The "happily ever after with too much information" ending, I'd have to call it. The "and they all lived happily ever after until they all got old and they all died of old age" ending. Fictional characters are innately more pure than real people, so you don't need to go contaminating them with eventualities of the real thing. Any good ending to a book like this either has the heroes die bravely and honorably in the act of saving the universe, or is left setting up a sequel. It doesn't matter if a sequel never actually comes, but it should always be SET UP for a sequel as if it was going to come. This sucker did the worst possible thing. It killed off the characters in the worst way, AND it left loose ends. What was all that about his earlier self coming back to the 2050s to bail himself out with the million dollars and the instructions to "get in the car and go"? What, did his self in 1969 leave instructions in his will that someone who kind of looks like he did when he was young would give the million dollars to the law firm at such and such time and place with such and such instructions? Who would be appointed for this role, since they wouldn't know until he was the right age and the time to do it was near, what this appointed person would look like? That was the WHOLE REASON for his believing that he would eventually find a way to make it back to the past. That was the whole reason for him continuing to go forward. That was the whole reason for the story progressing. That's a pretty big loose end if you ask me!

So like I said in the title of this review, this is the sort of thing Michael Crichton might have come up with. A fantastically thought-provoking and exciting premise, but the devil's in the details; everything after the initial set-up is a disappointment that could just as well have been arbitrarily created by a child, especially the ending. Just like them giving up the power and that sphere taking off in Sphere....

Add to that some things I'd rather not read in my science fiction, thank you very much (Some things that would NEVER appear in golden-age sci-fi for instance, and is unfortunately becoming increasingly popular as standards slide from Victorian to acceptable to total trash. Is "Joe" Haldeman really a man or is this one of those cases where a woman uses a pen-name - like Andre Norton - so that people will take her more seriously? Andre Norton at least played the part well. I can certainly imagine lonely housewives would go for this book, and "go" for the main character especially), and we have a loser that's inappropriate for children and too annoying for most adults. Or it least it should be too annoying for most adults. But considering what's on television, I maybe shouldn't overestimate how discerning most adults are.

This book is the literary equivalent to a great summer blockbuster. There is very little in the way of new ideas about technology, but classic ideas get recycled in very interesting ways. It's a very fast read with great characters, an epic-like story and lots of action and humor. If you want fun, this is it. If you want serious, deep and philosophical then read The Forever War instead.

Summary: More time traveling fun from Haldeman. His third take on the topic won't win him any awards, but it sure is a great read. You'll have trouble putting it down for very long and the pages will pass by at faster than the speed of light.

This is a fine piece of fiction work on the topic of time travel, it touches all the interesting aspects involved, even though the actual travelling is mostly forward.

The author used the forwarding time travel to trace the evolution steps of human society, some of them are interesting. However the ending seems to be rushed, it basically invokes a higher power to solve everything which is disappointing.

I've read and enjoyed some of Joe Haldeman's earlier work so I was excited about this one, but ultimately disappointed. It read like an outline of an actual good novel -- the bones were there but nothing was fleshed out after the first few chapters. Character development dropped off in the middle, and it's difficult for things to have impact when they whizz by so quickly. The ending was lackluster, largely because you don't end up caring about any of the characters.

The most disappointing thing is that it feels as if there's a good book lurking in there, a few drafts after this one, it's just unfortunately not what was actually published.

I'm suspicious of any fiction that is written for the sole purpose of presenting a view at the expense of the entertaining fiction it is supposed to be. I've read stories that present views for and against things that I personally believe without problem, but this story appeared to use the first third of the book to develop a science capable of getting the protagonist to a future society dominated by a misguided, stereotypical view of Christianity.

There, began an endless bashing of Christianity, for what purpose I'm not quite sure, except perhaps to express some insecurity held by the author. It's really quite amazing in that regard. I read on for some time before giving up. If the story later "moved on", so be it, but I was no longer entertained. The writing just fell apart. It's a shame really, since the time travel aspect of the story had promise. It got to a point where I felt as if I were reading two different novels.

A previous rater called this a quick read and, unfortunately, the rater is correct. It's a quick read because it's a great read! The style, the pace, the flow is like a big winter-time comfortable slipper. I enjoyed this book immensely. However, one big question if I may--who sprang for Matt's bail if Matt (spoiler alert) finally ended up in 1898?

If you're looking for the best science fiction has to offer, then look no further than Joe Haldeman. In The Accidental Time Machine we meetthe college drop-out now MIT assitant named Matt Fuller. Discovering a simple machine he built was the final part of Prof. Marsh's larger experiment. He later takes the machine home so he can experiment further with it. Well, it didn't take long for him to see if he would be able to teleport with the machine. This is a great book, and one I recommend every science fiction fan should read.

For those who would like to learn more on the topic I'd recommend Time Snatchers by Hines Lenard F. Time Snatchers

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.

I really liked this book. I finished it in two days. It would have been a stay up all night book, but being 38 and a mom I can't afford to do that any more. I just found it very entertaining. I loved the glimpses I got of MIT and its imagined future. I just wish he had spent more time in each of his futures.

An interesting quick read, but ultimately disappointing. Character development sputters out after a briefly interesting start. The story is fast paced, but appears to lose its way half way through.

The Deus-ex-machina ending is completely unsatisfying and leaves more questions than it answers - why is backwards time travel suddenly an option? What happens to the paradoxical time loops mentioned earlier? Where do these all-powerful beings come from?

If you are interested in great SF, try Haldeman's "All My Sins Remembered" which is less well known than "The Forever War", but orders of magnitude better than this book.

All My Sins Remembered
The Forever War

i enjoyed it and the pacing keeps you flowing through it at a good clip. visions of the future are descriptive at times, fly by at others, but ultimately you can get a good sense for what the author is describing

I really enjoyed this one. Matt is a great character: a regular guy who happens to be brilliant in some ways and incompetent in others--like a lot of us. Believable and likeable. And I have a fondness for time-travel yarns, especially when they're this well put-together. The most fun you can have reading fiction is when you're dying to know what happens next. That happens with this book a lot. Great fun!

Haldeman's ingenuity delivers cutting-edge technological speculation and irresistibly compelling reading. You can't wait to find out what happens next. Each world the protagonist reaches is different than what comes before and you wonder if the future holds little in store for mankind; as Haldeman is quite pessimistic. The ending could have been a book in itself but wasn't. It was appropriate, if not suspense-laden.

I'm a pretty big fan of Joe Haldeman's other work, after reading The Forever War a while back. I stumbled across this book, liked the premise and gave it a try. As far as time travel stories go, I thought the idea was well executed and a good, fun read. Would also recommend Camouflage!

This was one of my favorite sci-fi books. It had a great sense of humor and was very funny, but had great time-travel sci-fi elements as well. Just a fun, fun read that I wish I could read again for the first time. If only all new sci-fi novels were as fun...

This is a time travel book? If you like "The Girl, Gold Watch and Everything", you might like this. Like that book, this seemed to be written by someone who did all his research from his recliner. And what's his beef with Christians and the Bible? I found myself skipping pages just to see if it got interesting, but gave up a third of the way into it.

Haldeman drew upon his own experiences at MIT to establish a setting for much of the story which did a great deal to assist the reader in becoming immersed. I enjoyed the book and especially liked the ending with how loose ends are tied.

I was very excited when I read the dust jacket description of this story. I'm a sucker for time travel stories, and the idea of a time machine that only goes in one direction, and 12x further each time was novel. At my insistence, my wife bought the book for me for my birthday.

WARNING-SPOILERS!
But, I was very disappointed with the ending of the book. After the roller coaster ride of each jump being VERY different from the last, and the tension building between the characters, I thought that the author gave up having the main character think his way out of his predicament, and had omnipotent/all-powerful outside force come in to clean up the mess. Admittedly, having the main characters end up in their own past was a nice touch, but I still did not like the way the book ended.

_The Accidental Time Machine_ by Joe Haldeman is a fun, quick read, one I thoroughly enjoyed. Not perhaps ultra deep, as the book does not tackle any of the great questions of life or of science fiction, but it was an enjoyable time travel romp, the story of one man and later a companion of his and their journey farther and farther into the future.

The main character is Matt Fuller, a graduate school dropout of sorts (forever putting off finishing his Ph.D), barely eking out a living working as a lab assistant at MIT. Working with Dr. Marsh, he discovers that a machine he had put together for the professor, a simple device designed to emit a single photon, a calibration device that was part of a larger experiment that Dr. Marsh was working on, had the power to vanish. Matt pushed the button on the machine and the device disappeared, reappearing a second and a half later. The professor of course didn't see this happen, assumed, not incorrectly, that Matt had had too little sleep and real food (other than Twinkies and coffee), and should go on home for the evening. Matt pushed the button again, and the machine dutifully vanished, then reappeared 15 seconds later. Naturally, Dr. Marsh didn't see this event either.

The machine was not designed to move at all, either in time or space, and Matt had no idea how or why the device was vanishing and reappearing. All he knew was that it was big news, that unless he had proof Dr. Marsh and others would assume he was on drugs and/or insane, and that he had to get more "scientific" about his study of it. Essentially stealing the device, Matt set up a somewhat more controlled environment at home, worked out the math, and figured out that the device would be gone in ever larger increments and also reappear slightly farther away each time. His calculations showed for instance that a fifth push of the button would cause it to vanish for 6 hours and 48 minutes, then 3.34 days, and then 465 days, and then for about 15 years (and also physically farther and farther away from its original position).

Getting ever more elaborate with his experiments after each jump, after one of the jumps he decides to see - after verifying a newly bought pet turtle survived the jumps - to see if he could jump with the machine. Talking an acquaintance of his into letting him sit in his old-fashioned all-metal car (as apparently anything metal in contact with the device along with that thing's contents jumped as well), Matt got in the car, pushed the button...and well, found himself in the near future, wanted for murder of the car's owner, who apparently dropped dead when his car with Matt inside it vanished, thus beginning Matt's adventures through time, jumping ever forward into the future to escape one predicament after another.

The first few jumps were to a futuristic world but still quite recognizable to Matt, but the farther future - 177.5 years or so into the future, then to the 45th century, then several million years - produced ever stranger worlds and people.

Is Matt ever able to find someone in the future who understands time travel, to enable him to go back into the past? What does fate hold in store for Matt? A fun book, though I am not sure I entirely understood the ending, I nevertheless enjoyed it.

Where oh where to begin with this potboiler? Well, for starters, an MIT grad school student happens to invent a time machine. a device purposely vague as to looks or operation. It can only send to the future whatever is attached to it via metal (lol) and each trip is increasingly further. Think 1 second, 7 seconds, 1 minute, 1 day, 1 week, etc. At least this way the author does not have to offer details on either the device OR the science behind it.

Matt must be the luckiest inventor on Earth because he appears in a state of chaotic inebriation most of the time when not welding his time machine in a few hours from "parts at the university." (Yes, you read correctly.)He jumps ahead a few days, gets arrested & released by a mystery man from...the future??? He's charged with theft yet given a million dollar bail - go figure!

Dissecting the "plot" is a dreaded but necessary task. Matt jumps 177 years and finds an 18th century America with dashes of super-duper technology. The Eastern seaboard, that bastion of evangelicalism (lol), has accepted the Second Coming. Yes, Jesus floated down from heaven into the Oval Office, stoping a "civil war" (reasons undisclosed) and worked a few miracles. So states where less than 25% attend church once a month discard modern civilization and revert 1,000 years to a Holy Roman Empire, New World style. MIT is now reborn (sorry) as Mass Inst of Theosopy. The only books one can find are stunted histories or Bibles. I half-expected the citizens to speak in King James style. For some reason, electricity, running water and the like have disappeared.

Our hero meets a cute, young virgin who babbles constantly about Jesus and then he meets the man himself. "Jesus", a hologram, acts tough but as Matt takes further leaps in time, Jesus begins appearaing in his and his paramour's dreams "so they can't trace him" -LOLOL- offering advice, warnings and the like. You get the idea that "Jesus" is really a time traveler from the future. Finally. Matt & gal pal are allowed to go "back" but he must choose: Exact Location or Exact Time. It's the height of absurdity since "Jesus" & pals have not had any trouble finding him whenever and wherever they wanted. The couple chooses location and arrives at MIT...only it's circa late 19th century. Of course Matt knows all the science and rises from janitor to professor. Gal pal instantly adapts to this new age and admits that she is no longer a believer - an admission that one could have guessed on first meeting. If the author was attempting a comical Handmaid's Tale, it was a success. If he seriously thought his depiction of a theocracy served as a warning, he was seriously mistaken. My Grade - D (for unplanned humor)

I agree with several other reviewers who notice that "The Accidental Time Machine" is a really entertaining, light, but rather shallow read. It's certainly smoothly written, with humor and subtle irony, but doesn't contain anything special - just another time-travel story, a few hours of easy reading if you like science fiction, not more. However, not less, as well! The story is well constructed, avoiding too glaring paradoxes, so it's a smooth reading experience.

....as in my personal travel from Michigan to Chicago on the train. Quick and entertaining read. Although as others have said there are many loose ends and the books loses momentum about half-way through. This is my first novel by this author so I don't have anything to compare it to. All in all, a good beach, or travel read.

A story doesn't have to have a great meaning or some grand theme. It doesn't need to have strong character development. A good story can thrive simply on keeping the reader in suspense. But, if this is the path the author takes, you characters must be placed in peril and they must at the very least loose a few battles before winning the war (or win a few battles before losing the war). Unfortunately, the main character wins (or in the worst cases ties) every encounter. Save for one occasion in this book there is no point at which you can even have any concern over the characters well being. The ending also appeared very rushed.

The Accidental Time Machine (2007) is a standalone SF novel. It is a time travel tale, set initially in the near future and then further uptime.

In this novel, Matthew Fuller is a geek and a graduate assistant at MIT. While he is working for Dr. Marsh, Matt builds a calibrator -- it emits one photon per chronon -- that also happens to travel in time. Whenever he pushes the reset button, it disappears and then reappears.

The first time it disappears, Matt calls for Marsh to come see, but the calibrator returns before his boss responds. Marsh thinks he has been awake too long and suggests that he get some rest. Then Marsh leaves to get a little sleep himself.

Matt figures that thirty hours without sleep is not unreasonable and starts testing the device. The next time he presses the button, the device is gone for over ten seconds. Oops!

He decides to get a little more precise in the timing. For the third trial, he checks his watch before pushing the button and the box is gone for slightly less than three minutes. For the next trial, he clocks the disappearance with the stopwatch function: 34 minutes, 33.22 seconds.

When Matt plots the intervals between disappearance and reappearance on semi-log paper, they seem to be increasing in a logarithmic function. Each event takes about twelve times as long as the previous event. He calculates that the next interval probably would be around six hours, so he decides to check it at home.

In this story, Matt blocks the reset button and wraps the device in two trash-can liners. Then he carries the device through the snow to the Red Line and then from the East Lexington station to his apartment. Naturally, he hasn't worn his boots and the sneakers got soaked.

Once he is in his apartment, Matt sets the calibrator on his couch. Then he takes a beer out of the fridge, picks up the latest Physical Review Letters and carries them into the bathroom. He runs a few inches of hot water into the tub, takes off his sneakers, and puts his feet in to soak.

While Matt is thawing out, drinking the beer and reading the journal, his mother calls him and fusses about his bathroom phone. Matt tells her an edited version of his activities, but leaves out all mention of the time machine and his breakup with Kara.

After hanging up the phone, someone knocks on his door. Before he can finish wiping his feet, the door is opened from the outside to let in Kara. She has come to pick up a forgotten item. She does comment about his clean feet prior to giving him the key and walking out to her ride.

This story shows Matt learning how to use the calibrator to transport himself into the future. It also shows him getting into more and more trouble as he travels uptime. His boss reasons out how the device works as a time machine, but Matt only finds out why the device works in the far future.

Matt really doesn't like the future very much and wants to return to his home time. So the tale is basically a quest for knowledge about controlling the device. The time machine itself is not very original, although the terminology used in the story may have some relation to reality (see the Author's Note). So the gist of the story is Matt's relationships with other people; initially very poor, but improving in time.

Recommended for Haldeman fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of time travel, strange futures, and human relationships.

-Arthur W. Jordin

part h.g.wells, part benbow, part 'how do you solve the back to the past paradox?', haldeman's shaggy dog story is intriguing, with the hallmark o'henry-style twist at the end that leaves a satisfying little aftertaste of spice. joe's afterword (which is what my review title refers to) is also revealing in a serendipity-synchronicity way. i recommend the book for amusement, but it won't (and isn't intended to) challenge einstein or hawking, etc. but it's worth the time and money.

At the beginning the novel is well written and you'll be interested in the story. By half book you'll read how is the future and the problems Matt have there, here is when the story starts being dull and it keeps that way till the end. Of course nobody can tell us how will be the future but I don't think it will be as JH wrote it here.

Is time travel possible? This book provides one scenario where it just might be. Perhaps a defective component will usher us into time travel, and Joe Haldeman does a great job of reducing tough technical ideas into easy to read words. My only compliant is not fully describing how and who the person was who traveled back in time to bail Matt out of jail. If this was necessary to traveling further in time, then why was it not necessary at the end of the book? Minor issue for a great science fiction work.

The story was mildly interesting though the characters were shallow and two-dimensional. While the author introduces ideas and lines of thought that have great potential, he drops them and leaves you unsatisfied. Whether it's laziness or perhaps he can't be bothered with exploring the realm of "What if?", I can't decide. And why does the author hate Christians so much? Reads almost like an atheist manifesto. My time machine shows this book sitting on the bargain shelf in the near future. 75% off.

Double hop device.

A grad student flukes into a working graviton-based time machine, around the same time as losing his job and his girlfriend dumping him.

Needless to say, he manages to get into trouble then.

The odd thing about his device is that it jumps logarithmically in time and space, and can't go the other way.

The start is the most interesting, what happens after he starts using it gets a bit on the tedious side.

I love the time travel genre and was eager to read this book. As I approached the end of the book, I began to realize that there was no way the loose ends were going to be wrapped up in time. Sure enough, the ending was about as lame as it gets. I felt a little cheated, but most of the book was pretty good. I won't put in a spoiler, but don't expect too much.

I enjoyed this book very much until the last few chapters. I really would have liked more information about the characters lives when they got back to a more normal time and place. I have noticed a trend with a lot of books that just can't seem to find great end game to match their great beginnings?

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.

This is the modern version of H.G. Well's Time Machine. Except the scientist happens to discover time travel by accident. A very interesting look into the future. Well written and a definite page turner.

I honestly wasn't very impressed with this book. It had a lot of promise, but the ideas just weren't developed enough. This read like a book put out to fulfill a contract, rather then any other reason. Many interesting ideas were introduced, just to fall to the side and get no further development. All in all I was disappointed with this book, although I DID finish reading it!

This was my first Joe Haldeman book and I have to say that I was very impressed!! Time travel is one of my favorite subjects and to travel along in this adventure to the future was extremely entertaining and thought provoking.. Great novel!!!

I'm with J. Yuziuk "I love the time travel genre and was eager to read this book. As I approached the end of the book, I began to realize that there was no way the loose ends were going to be wrapped up in time. Sure enough, the ending was about as lame as it gets. I felt a little cheated, but most of the book was pretty good. I won't put in a spoiler, but don't expect too much.

Haldeman's, "The Accidental Time Machine," is a neat little romp of a science fiction novel. An engaging story with engaging characters, suspensful moments, a well told story, and an awesome sweep over millions of years of time. Would have given it four and a half stars but for the pot shots at Christianity. I don't understand why so many science fiction authors today think its a good idea to take pot shots at Christianity when their largest market (the USA) features a population where the super majority self identify as Christians. Can't you write great science fiction with great science without criticizing Christianity. Nobody can Prove that the universe was or wasn't created by intelligent design, nor is there currently any way to Prove the nature of that intelligence. All logic and reason requires an initial assumption to build on, and that initial assumption is a matter of faith, not proof. Keep your world view to yourself Joe, and I for one will enjoy your books more.

Haldeman disappoints in this book. It adds nothing to the time travel genre. Tired ideas and tired jokes do not an interesting novel make. Haldeman couldn't write lousy prose if you held his feet to the fire, but this weak story and lame humor overwhelm his usual mastery of language.

While the title and description sounded interesting, the story went down hill fast. The author is too focused on his anti-Christian views and neglects telling an entertaining (or even an unentertaining) story. His religious views don't make much sense either. This book is definitely not on the same book shelf (or even in the same library) as H. G. Well's Time Machine. Save your money!

I don't think I've ever felt strongly enough about a book to submit a review. This book compelled me to do so.

Joe Haldeman clearly does not know how to finish a story. This is a prime example of a story that was powered by a great concept, and quickly fell apart.

Haldeman spends so much time developing details on parts of the story that completely lose their significance due to the tumultuous chain of events in the book. His view of the future lacks the imagination one would expect from an experienced sci-fi novelist. Some might find it humorous, but I found it to be tragically disconnected.

When I was done with this book, I gave it to my one-year-old so she could have something to tear to shreds. Every torn page was like therapy for me.

This novel is a takeoff of H.G. Wells "Time Machine" and Robert Heinlen's "A Door Into Summer". It had great possibilities but lost it's momentum when it degenerated into a "Hate the Jews, Christians and church" story. 1/3 of the book was taken over by this theme with numerous references to anti church and God remarks. I found the climax of the book to be as big a let down as his short space trip. I enjoyed "The Forever War" but found this just went on forever. I was really looking forward to a great read when I picked it up but I should have left it on the library shelf.