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The Accidental Time Machine |
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| Book: Paperback: Mass Market | 6.49 x 4.29in | 288 pages | ISBN 9780441016167 | 29 Jul 2008 | Ace | 18 - AND UP |
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NOW IN PAPERBACK-FROM THE AUTHOR OF MARSBOUND
Grad- school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when he inadvertently creates a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose in taking a time-machine trip himself—or so he thinks.
Time machines represent an interesting anomaly in science fiction, because we tend to think of them as "hard" sf—science fiction with a strong scientific bent. But in fact there's less actual evidence of time machines being possible than there is of werewolves or vampires, which are immediately classified as fantasy (even though the outskirts of medicine describe people who do exhibit lycanthropic or vampiric behavior).
It may just be the word "machine," with its connection to engineering and technology, which gives this fantasy idea a spurious solidity. The one in The Accidental Time Machine is quite solid and full of metal and electronic stuff, but it wasn't built to be a time machine, and nobody knows why it works.
There was the most curious coincidence associated with it. I do know a very little bit about the relativistic description of time travel—Kurt Goedel famously pointed out to Einstein that his field equations were not inconsistent with a kind of time travel—and so I was able to do some pretty intense fakery on the weird edge of modern physics.
Specifically, I conjured up gravitons and string theory, which might as well have something to do with time travel, because nobody's ever described a graviton and most people can't figure out what string theory is really about.
About a year later, when I was finishing up the book, there was an article in New Scientist pointing out how gravitons and string theory could be used to make time travel possible.
I swear I didn't have anything to do with it. I definitely did not go back into the past and make sure the article got published. Honest.
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