[Review] The Accidental Time-Traveler - Joe Haldeman
On a whim other day (I needed new softball cleats, and a pre-owned bookstore next to a pre-owned sporting goods store is just the kind of delightful evil my budget needed to discover), I picked this one up, because, as I've probably noted previously, I enjoy the fuck out of his writing, both long and short. It's breezy, it's smart, and it's thoughtful. It's not, however, always heavy on description (a lack that my own writing tends to emulate, which means that I recognize this as both a style and a possible problem; Joe's tends towards coming across as modesty on the part of the speaker, which, since the protagonist is a fish out of chronological water in the eventual presence of a presumably gorgeous but not very worldly companion, makes narrative sense).
The title is a bit of a misnomer; the protagonist is anything but accidental in his leaps into the future (he's a scientist; he plans and documents things); the accidents happen when he arrives and has to adapt to the circumstances in which he finds himself (non-spoilery spoiler: many of these circumstances kind of suck, but at the same time, seem surprisingly friendly, or at least non-threatening in ways the hardened sci-fi reader has come to expect, even with a the healthy but good-humored cynicism included here).
TATT echoes themes of Joe's other works, especially The Forever War, chiefly those of the disconnection of someone from the present getting flung into an increasingly distant and confusing future, and having to make due with what companionship is able to be found. As someone who is no stranger to saying, and having those around me say, "The future is awesome" / "I love living in the future," it's not so much a cloud around that silver lining as a reminder that, at some point, we may find ourselves individually failing to adapt as quickly to the accelerating changes around us (the fact that TATT and TFW were written more than thirty years apart doesn't change anything but Joe's ability to pin the Everyman to someone recognizable; TFW was military and dealt with the disconnection wrought by the Vietnam war; TATT is academic and, consequently, feels much more "innocent," for lack of a better word).
Ultimately, the story left me wanting more, but not because I wanted to know what happened next, but because I wanted to know what we'd missed out on (I haven't been exposed to several of the contemporary time-crisis works in the gestalt of the early 21st century, like Memento or The Time-Traveler's Wife; the lady who worked at the bookstore politely attempted to foist a companion book - a treatise on H.G. Wells' original work, which on me; I declined).
The story also takes a somewhat nontraditional narrative arc in that there's no real antagonist other than circumstance, and the protagonist is less "changed" than "adapted" by the end. As a comfortable guy reading about a comfortable guy who is made increasingly uncomfortable, and ultimately rediscovers a certain kind of comfort, it's easy to relate to, if not the sort of thing I'm apt to encounter 1:1. It is fiction, after all, and I'm no quantum physicist.
Truth be told, Joe's afterward, where he talked about his own surprising prescience in terms of the scientific mumbo-jumbo he conjured to explain time travel in both these books ending up being fairly spot-on, was my favorite bit. If it sounds like I'm damning TATT with faint praise, it's less that than just wanting more out of it than what was the equivalent of a "beach read." I've gotten a taste for the heavier work in his oeuvre (TFW, The Hemingway Hoax, and the rest of the stuff in A Separate War and Other Stories), so this felt, at least on my first read, to be fairly light and cheerful by comparison. Surprising nobody, I'm into the heavy metal and doom and gloom (child of Gibson's dystopia, I own that), and I guess TATT fell victim to my own expectations.
Three and a third time-slips out of five.
(not sure if Mr. Haldeman hizzownself will read this, but it's cool as fuck that he hangs out on LJ anyway)
The title is a bit of a misnomer; the protagonist is anything but accidental in his leaps into the future (he's a scientist; he plans and documents things); the accidents happen when he arrives and has to adapt to the circumstances in which he finds himself (non-spoilery spoiler: many of these circumstances kind of suck, but at the same time, seem surprisingly friendly, or at least non-threatening in ways the hardened sci-fi reader has come to expect, even with a the healthy but good-humored cynicism included here).
TATT echoes themes of Joe's other works, especially The Forever War, chiefly those of the disconnection of someone from the present getting flung into an increasingly distant and confusing future, and having to make due with what companionship is able to be found. As someone who is no stranger to saying, and having those around me say, "The future is awesome" / "I love living in the future," it's not so much a cloud around that silver lining as a reminder that, at some point, we may find ourselves individually failing to adapt as quickly to the accelerating changes around us (the fact that TATT and TFW were written more than thirty years apart doesn't change anything but Joe's ability to pin the Everyman to someone recognizable; TFW was military and dealt with the disconnection wrought by the Vietnam war; TATT is academic and, consequently, feels much more "innocent," for lack of a better word).
Ultimately, the story left me wanting more, but not because I wanted to know what happened next, but because I wanted to know what we'd missed out on (I haven't been exposed to several of the contemporary time-crisis works in the gestalt of the early 21st century, like Memento or The Time-Traveler's Wife; the lady who worked at the bookstore politely attempted to foist a companion book - a treatise on H.G. Wells' original work, which on me; I declined).
The story also takes a somewhat nontraditional narrative arc in that there's no real antagonist other than circumstance, and the protagonist is less "changed" than "adapted" by the end. As a comfortable guy reading about a comfortable guy who is made increasingly uncomfortable, and ultimately rediscovers a certain kind of comfort, it's easy to relate to, if not the sort of thing I'm apt to encounter 1:1. It is fiction, after all, and I'm no quantum physicist.
Truth be told, Joe's afterward, where he talked about his own surprising prescience in terms of the scientific mumbo-jumbo he conjured to explain time travel in both these books ending up being fairly spot-on, was my favorite bit. If it sounds like I'm damning TATT with faint praise, it's less that than just wanting more out of it than what was the equivalent of a "beach read." I've gotten a taste for the heavier work in his oeuvre (TFW, The Hemingway Hoax, and the rest of the stuff in A Separate War and Other Stories), so this felt, at least on my first read, to be fairly light and cheerful by comparison. Surprising nobody, I'm into the heavy metal and doom and gloom (child of Gibson's dystopia, I own that), and I guess TATT fell victim to my own expectations.
Three and a third time-slips out of five.
(not sure if Mr. Haldeman hizzownself will read this, but it's cool as fuck that he hangs out on LJ anyway)