The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

This is a fun story about a one-way time machine that is, as the title suggests, accidentally discovered. Matthew Fuller, a physics doctoral student at MIT discovers that a fairly commonly used piece of equipment in his lab has an odd capacity. What is most interesting about this novel is the way that time travel functions. Fuller discovers the machine time machine by accident and does not know how it works or how to control it. In fact, the time machine that he uses is a commonly used piece of lab equipment that mis-functions in a way that he is never able to figure out. Fuller does discover a couple of interesting aspects of travel using this device. First, it only goes forward and he cannot select the destination. Rather, he discovers that the leaps forward are logarithmic and he can roughly calculate the destination times of each jump which will take the machine exponentially farther into the future.

Second, the physical location of the destination shifts as well. This may be due to the movement of the planet through space or the galaxy through the universe or the expansion of the universe or something completely different. These are all my speculations and the novel never attempts to explain the movements in space, it is just a fact of the narrative.

His first experiments involve just sending the machine, and then the machine plus a turtle into the future. These first jumps are small, on the order of minutes and then hours, so he has room to ponder the usage of the machine. Fuller finds himself in trouble almost as soon as he begins to travel himself. Being a poor graduate student living in Boston, Fuller needs a Faraday cage to connect to the machine in order to transport himself (another unexplained rule of the machine) and the only person he knows who owns a car made of steel is his drug dealer. This dealer is murdered soon after Fuller leaps using his car and so is a suspect. It doesn't help that the arrival location puts fuller with the car and machine in the middle of traffic, causing a pile up.

Fuller ends up using the machine to jump to avoid danger and keeps moving into the future. I don't want to recap all of it here, so I will myself jump to what I find interesting about it.

First, the further out Fuller gets into the future, the stranger things get, but not all of it is good. Once he jumps something like 170 years into the future and the Eastern Seaboard has reverted to a sort of dark ages. The people of the time are aware of technology but reject it. The society is hyper-religious because they believe that Jesus has returned to Earth and helps head a theocratic government. Fuller realizes that this Jesus is holographic and he recognizes the advanced technology used to keep up the illusion.

In another jump a couple of thousand years into the future, Fuller comes into contact with an artificial intelligence that is the city of Los Angeles. The program that had been built to integrate the technology of the city and to provide for the citizens had gained autonomy or some sort of self-awareness and inhabited a sort of liminal space between a physical existence and a digital one. This program becomes another travel companion for a time.

There are several other leaps that take place before Fuller discovers a way to get back and he learns a little about the laws of time travel and what makes it possible. The explanations are somewhat scientific but I won't try to summarize them here because they are less interesting than the story itself.
What I like about this novel is that Haldeman imagines fluctuations in the timeline. That is, the moving forward in time is not just a long, steady progression into a high tech utopia. There are conflicts and regressions. This seems more realistic. I also like the fact that we never understand the mechanism of time travel. I like a good time travel story that can somewhat realistically explain the science, but very little attempt is made here. Instead, this is a found-technology that cannot be replicated. Haldeman also invokes Gödelian strange loops when Fuller is trying to make sense of the time travel. This is not exactly a splitting-timeline explanation, but it is close. The narrative moves along at a good clip and there is just enough inter-personal tension and character development to keep it interesting without getting in the way of the story. Good quick read.