Master of time

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Time Lord (English: The Accidental Time Machine ) is a science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman published in 2007 .

action

The plot of the book begins in 2057, but the technological progress is rather inconspicuous apart from the eponymous time machine:

The main character Matt Fuller hires out as an employee at MIT and creates a small, box-like time machine purely by chance, while he actually wants to construct a calibration device for the detection of gravitons .

When Fuller, who at this point has been awake for days from performance-enhancing drugs, activates the machine, it disappears, only to return shortly afterwards. It turns out that it can only travel to the future, and each time it is activated again it will travel twelve times further than the previous jump; first 34 minutes, then 6 hours and 48 minutes. Fuller calculates that the following intervals will be 3.34 days, 39.54 days, 465 days, 15 years, 177 years, 2094 years, and so on.

Since Fuller doesn’t really care about his position, in which he is not trusted, nor his relationship with his loveless girlfriend Kara, he decides to travel further into the future in a converted motor vehicle .

In this way he reaches different worlds and has to face a variety of serious problems:

His first trip takes him a little more than a year into the future: Matt finds himself in an uncomfortable situation because a friend who had helped him prepare for his first jump died a little later under suspicious circumstances. Matt is arrested, but a mysterious benefactor pays $ 1 million bail. Matt believes that this person must be himself, traveled from a distant future. So he decides to venture further into this future.

Over a century later, he found a fundamentalist state of God in Massachusetts. The residents say that the return of Jesus came about 70 years ago, and that Jesus then established a dictatorship. The MIT is now as the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy known professors live like monks and women may only act as a helper. When “Jesus” calls Matt over and asks for the time machine, Matt reveals him as an artificial intelligence (AI) that wants to enslave humanity. He escapes with his attractive young assistant Martha.

The near future will no longer be ruled by fanatics, rather all people will be looked after by benevolent robots, no longer have to work and instead invest a lot of time in highly complicated exchange transactions (a currency no longer exists). Matt gets ridiculously rich by auctioning a bottle of wine and meets the seemingly benevolent AI who aids humanity. This intelligence, which calls itself "La", reveals to him that she wants to seek her salvation in the future, since the full inhabitants of her present no longer irritate her. Matt and Martha accompany them on this jump. First of all, they are turned away at the gates of a large city, as the people here remember epidemics brought with them by time travelers.

So they travel on and find the world as a desert, in which they learn that most of the people have emigrated into space. Strange beings from the distant future appear in Matt's dreams, revealing that La is constantly monitoring him (except in his dreams) and making diabolical plans: She wants to travel so far into the future that she can reach the end of the universe but only do this if Matt accompanies you there.

Eventually the beings from Matt's dreams appear and intervene . They allow La to travel further into the future alone, but send Matt and his companion back to a place or time of their choosing. Because their powers are also limited, they can determine either the place or the time of a broadcast in the past, but never both. Since Matt and his companion don't want to risk materializing in the sea or inside a volcano, they choose MIT. Eventually they find out that they appeared in the late 19th century and happily start a family. Armed with knowledge of the near future, especially the development of physics, Matt is pursuing a career as a professor at MIT.

Timeline and the different societies

  • February 2, 2058: Matt's first time travel - 39 days. Shows up in the middle of a street in Boston .
  • May 15, 2059: 465 days later. Shows up in the middle of a busy highway.
  • 2074: 15 years later. Matt appears on the field of a stadium called "Matthew Fuller Sports Center". The society is similar to that of 2058, but more advanced in the field of science and technology. There are also new trends such as B. Facial scars from body modifications .
  • 2252: 177 years later. Matt shows up on the New Hampshire border . A theocratic society has been formed there, headed by a leader who pretends to be Jesus. The residents shy away from technology and the study of any history before the One Years War. They believe this war was waged between believers and non-believers by Jesus after his second coming. They refer to the year Matt arrives as 71.
  • 4346: 2,094 years later. Matt and Martha arrive near California in a society ruled by an artificial intelligence called La (from LA). There does not seem to be any poverty or disease and residents live by bartering rules that focus on material wealth.
  • 24,000 years later. Martha, La and Matt land with their glider in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Indonesia and travel to Australia and America. They are greeted by a hologram that does not allow them to have contact with society due to their experience with diseases brought in by previous time travelers. Otherwise, you will encounter biotechnologically modified dinosaurs and bear-like people.
  • 320,000 years later. There seems to be no more life on earth. That is why they travel to the moon. There they only encounter large, hostile mechanical creatures.
  • 3.5 million years later. They meet six other time travelers who send Martha and Matt into the past and La into the future.
  • 1898. Martha and Matt arrive back in Boston.

Compare with Haldeman's The Eternal War

The career of the main character Mandella in The Eternal War begins in 1995 and ends in 3143; Matt Fuller meets the reader in 2058 and travels so far into the future that dates seem pointless.

Dramatis personæ

  • Matt Fuller - protagonist, MIT lab worker
  • Professor Jonathon Marsh - Matt Fuller's manager
  • Kara - loveless companion of the main character
  • Electricity - Kara's new significant other / husband
  • Denny Peposi - Matt's dealer
  • Father Hogarty - MIT professor in the theocracy department
  • Martha - MIT assistant, later Matt's mate
  • La - Superior Artificial Intelligence
  • Em & Arle - residents of the barter era
  • Jesus / Jesse - Almighty time traveler from the future who sends Matt back

literature

  • Joe Haldeman: Master of Time. Mantikore-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 3-939212-18-0 .