Outside A Dog

I’ve always been a sucker for a great time travel yarn.  I recently finished up two such tales.  The first is The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman.  Booklist says:

“Lowly MIT research assistant Matt Fuller toils away in a physics lab until one day he makes an odd discovery. A sensitive quantum calibrator keeps disappearing and reappearing moments later when he hits the reset button. With a little tinkering, Matt realizes that the device functions as a crude, forward-traveling time machine. With visions of Nobel Prizes dancing in his head, he latches it to a car and leaps into the future. The interesting wrinkle here is that each jump ahead is 12 times longer than the last. Matt’s successive futures involve jail time, unwelcome celebrity, and assorted holocausts in the earth’s climate. He begins to long for his native era.”

This book was a fun, quick, and easy read.  Not the deepest or most profound book out there, just something interesting to pass the time.

Next we have Timescape by Gregory Benford.  Amazon’s synopsis states:

“It’s 1998, and a physicist in Cambridge, England, attempts to send a message backward in time. Earth is falling apart, and a government faction supports the project in hopes of diverting or avoiding the environmental disasters beginning to tear at the edges of civilization. It’s 1962, and a physicist in California struggles with his new life on the West Coast, office politics, and the irregularities of data that plague his experiments. The story’s perspective toggles between time lines, physicists, and their communities. Timescape presents the subculture and world of scientists in microcosm: the lab, the loves, the grappling for grants, the pressures from university and government, the rewards and trials of relationships with spouses, the pressures of the scientific race, and the thrill of discovery.”

This one was a little longer and, imho, drier.  It’s chock full of scientific theory and physics jargon.  I normally enjoy this sort of thing, but this book was just plain boring.  I never really cared for any of the characters and nothing seemed to happen throughout the story.