The Accidental Time Machine
Having mentioned this book in my last post, I thought it might be a good idea to actually, you know, talk about it a little more. What a wild thought.
Image credit to http://elentari.vox.com/
Joe Haldeman’s observantly funny style, as I mentioned in the previous post, remains true in The Accidental Time Machine, despite having been written in 2007, nearly 40 years after The Forever War. It’s the tale of a graduate student at MIT whose calibration machine, meant only to release a proton at particular intervals, seems to be able to travel through time. First, it disappears for less than a second, then a slightly longer flash, then a few minutes, a few days, and then, he decides to go with it. Hijinks ensue.
My favorite parts of the novel were not, however, the hijinks, at least, not on the whole. It was the views at so many different distopian futures. In one, our hero Matt Fuller travels to MIT nearly a thousand years in the future, and finds it having reverted to a beat-down, wild-westian religions waste land where MIT is now the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy, and technology on the whole is considered evil, except when considered in context of God and his greater plan. Here Matt meets a young woman, a nun of sorts who is herself a graduate assistant (which now means something more akin to servant and is a position that only women are lowly enough to hold). He takes her farther into the future to escape the religious hell and eventually winds up in New Mexico with a woman called La, a sort of projection who is the spirit, or more, the collective consciousness and sometimes god, of Los Angeles: LA. But La’s intentions are not pure (are they ever?) and Matt soon discovers through a series of questionably Christian visions of Jesus (despite that Matt is a non-practicing Jew) that La wants the time machine for herself.
Don’t worry. It all makes sense.
This is much more a quick read than The Forever War; its simplicity, however, is not in the details but in the viewpoint. The novel starts (pretty much) in the here and now, so Matt’s thoughts are all very understood by someone else coming from the same mindset: you and I. There’s very much less back-story and more descriptions. It’s a lighter read in that the story is shockingly linear and for most of the tale there is one character. There are no losses stylistically, though: given the less-involved plot, Joe Haldeman uses the space to add little tie-ins to everything. Off-the-cuff comments and characters come full circle and sometimes even become the point of the thing. The last few pages are a karmic reprieve like no other, a glorious bow on top of the package you wouldn’t even known was missing if it wasn’t there because the stuff inside the box was so good anyway.
Image credit to http://www.nassaulibrary.org/
I’ve also just finished My Heartbeat by Garret Freymann-Weyr which I first discovered on The Book Project. I won’t go into it
too much since the book itself is so short, but its the story of a young girl, Ellen, trying to understand the relationship between her brother, Link, and his best friend, James. Are they gay? Does it matter? And what is gay, anyway? It’s a very sweet, understanding story about family, friends, and the relationships we share with them. It’s also a pretty accurate, unbiased view of the teenage mind. Give it a read if you like young adult lit or LGBT literature at all. It’s short and sweet.
As you may also have noticed, I’ve change the theme. The skinny column was getting on my nerves.
So? Have you read any good books yet this summer? Let me know about it in the comments!