RA Crossroads No. 3
Time Travel and Ronald Mallett
By Neal Wyatt -- Library Journal, 3/20/2008 3:02:00 PM
As Lewis Carroll’s Alice so aptly points out, "What is the use of a book...without pictures or conversations?" Welcome to RA Crossroads, where books, movies, music, and other media converge and whole-collection reader’s advisory service goes where it may. In this column, Ronald Mallett's NPR appearance leads me down a winding path.
I'm a sucker for a good time-travel story, even if the logic of the Terminator movies confuses me. So when I heard Ronald Mallett, a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, interviewed on This American Life, I was both fascinated and charmed.
Mallett’s Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission To Make Time Tr
avel a Reality recounts his motivations to study time travel. After his father died when he was ten, he became convinced that if he built a time machine he could travel back and save him. He started out with H.G. Wells's The Time Machine and based his first vehicle on the images in the Illustrated Classics edition.
From that experience, Mallett realized that stories make ideal travel companions. Time-travel works are particularly great company, providing as they do such imaginative outcomes and giddily confusing paradoxes. Readers who want to join Mallett in wandering around the edge of the space/time continuum might consider these excellent guides.
Start, as almost all travelers do, with Wells's The Time Machine, in which an inventor transports himself into the future and encounters the peaceful Eloi and the cannibalistic Morlocks. The 
fabulous illustrated version is available online. The George Pál version of the movie, a 1960s classic, has lots of fascinating special effects and a moodily perfect score. Don’t miss it.
The modern sf take on Wells’s world—with all its accompanying philosophical questions—is ably addressed by Robert J. Sawyer in his short story "On the Surface" (found in Future Wars, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff). Sawyer puts a fleet of time machines into the hands of the Morlocks and sees what happens. Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships has the inventor set off once again for the future—one he has already changed. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War works, too, and offers a nightmare vision of the consequences of journeying through time.
Frequency starring Dennis Quaid serves as a nice foil to the father/son tim
e travel idea Mallet is writing about, while 12 Monkeys and Quantum Leap make great parallel viewing, as each riffs off Wells and Mallett in different ways.
Next stop has to be Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, a dark tour de force. Try Kage Baker’s "The Company" books (the first of which is In the Garden of Iden) as well for a mix of history, adventure, and an insightful examination of the consequences of jumping through the continuum. Audrey Niffenegger's quirkily perfect and perfectly charming The Time Traveler's Wife is another great choice because it takes a fresh and intriguing look at the effects of living between the space/time grid.
Wrapping up our journey, Clifford Pickover's Time: A Traveler's Guide and J. Richard Gott's Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time are good choices for those who get interested in Mallett’s science. Readers who find themselves amazed by Mallett's story of building a time machine out of vacuum tubes and old bicycle will like Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys, another memoir of cool experiments and coming of age.
