THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE
by Joe Haldeman
A time-travel yarn in the classic style from Haldeman (A Separate War, 2006, etc.).
In 2058, MIT graduate student Matt Fuller realizes that the calibrator he’s built is actually a forward-traveling time machine. He tests it with a pet turtle, and then sticks it into a 1956 bright-red Thunderbird and escapes his rather unpromising present. Each time the machine is activated, it travels farther ahead. His first jaunt lands him about a month into the future, where he’s faced with a murder charge; subsequent trips, impelled either by simply awkward or by downright dangerous situations, transport him to strange and often unpleasant futures, inhabited by religious fundamentalists, ignorant lotus-eaters or, apparently, by no humans at all. Along with two companions, an innocent young woman and a potentially duplicitous artificial intelligence, Matt persists in his journey, armed with evidence that suggests that just ahead of him lies the means to return to his starting point.
A great deal of fun and compulsively readable while it lasts, and it leaves the reader wanting more.