Time Travelers Never Die

I admit it. I'm a sucker for time travel stories. I read Heinlein's The Door Into Summer when I was a teenager, Time After Time and The Guns of the South in my 20's and when I run across a time travel novel I'm usually an easy mark for it. So, Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt seemed an interesting title so I went for it.

With a title like Time Travelers Never Die, of course, the first thing the author is going to do is open the book with a funeral. The funeral is for Michael Shelborne who is a gifted physicist who mysteriously disappears. After the funeral his son Adrian Shelborne, also a physicist but a much less gifted one than his father, receives a letter from his father's attorney which puts him in possession of two Q-pods that seem to be akin to MP3 players. Adrian soon discovers the Q-pods to be time machines. Shel, as Adrian is known as, quickly decides that his father didn't die but went into the past and something happened to him there and he was unable to return. He enlists his friend Dave and they go into the past to find Shel's father.

Soon the urgency to find Shel's father dissipates quickly after they fail to find him in a crowd but they rationalize "they have all the time in the world," and Shel and Dave are off on their time travels. The main conceit of the novel, to rescue Shel's father is relegated to sub-plot status. Their time travel adventures seem like very facile time travelogues with them visiting the library at Alexandria and taking pictures with their cell phones of the lost plays of Sophocles. Which they bring them back and give them anonymously to a colleague of Dave's in a subplot that is dropped without a real resolution. The travels themselves are very brief. We're never given a real sense of the time or the people Shel and Dave visit. They're more like a montage of history, or maybe Cliff`s Notes of time travelers.

Of course when you time travel you have to watch out for paradoxes. There does seem to be a penalty for creating a paradox, a heart attack. Shel ends up one time in the ocean due to the possibility of a paradox. But after Shel is dumped in the ocean, early on, it's never established whether there is a self-correcting force in the universe that abhors paradoxes. Shel and Dave seem endlessly able to travel create paradoxes and don't seem to suffer any consequences.

Although, with these reservations this is a highly readable book. It just maybe McDevitt's style flows nicely and carries you along with the story. I've read other reviews and this novel had its genesis in a short story and that the novel is padded out. It doesn't feel padded out to me. More like McDevitt thought of some really cool things to see and do in the past and he added them, but didn't really tie them in with anything and they didn't add to a satisfying resolution.

Since I enjoy Mr. McDevitt's novels very much, I expected to like this, and I did. As I write this, I haven't seen any of the other reviews, but I assume there are the usual amount of people complaining of lack of character depth and poorly conceived story. Well, there are always going to be people who read a story that they don't like, assuming (I guess) that this one will be different. And, if you don't like time travel stories, I don't see this one converting you. But I see the main characters as well fleshed out, and the writing as good as any other of his books. He doesn't go into the construction of the time machine, nor does he delve into the science behind it all that much, but that doesn't keep the story from being quite enjoyable. I also think that he handles the possible result of a paradox in an original manner, keeping it from being the focus of the story. I enjoyed the encounters with the historical people and places of the past (no plot giveaways, please)and would recommend it to anyone who finds a non fantasy science fiction story enjoyable.

SPOILER(S) ALERT(S)
Oh dear.
I used to really enjoy JacK McDevitt. He was my guilty pleasure. Fun, exciting summer reading... but this?
It doesn't have a plot, just a series of "time travel" vignettes. Oh look, they're at the race riots! Oh look, now lets's go to the library of Alexandria! (Actually the best most "fun" part of the book. Might have made a good SHORT story.) Oh look now we're going to steal some ones corpse but it's ok 'cause we'll send their family money, and we wont cause a paradox... even if there isn't any Science in this book to worry about. (Sorry Jack, this scene is reprehensible, and I'd be personally happy to be thrown on a garbage heap when I die, but that's MY choice. Ugh!)
Oh look, If I take the device yesterday (time travel get it) then I've got an extra one to... (Sorry again Jack, but this was silly, and made no real sense, it seemed paradoxical itself, but I'll be honest, by that point, I was just reading to get done. I didn't bother to see if it really made sense.)
Just terrible. A quarter of the way in I thought "I should just stop reading" - and I was right, I should have, but no, on I read.
STAY AWAY from this Stinker.
Read ANCIENT SHORES (I don't know if he's ever topped this.)

Oh, and if you're reading McDevitt (any McDevitt), I'll bet money at some point a character will raise their fist (as a victory signal). Now think people, when was the last time you saw ANYONE (outside of maybe an underdog sports movie) do that.

I am a huge Jack McDevitt fan. I am generally waiting with bated breath for his next book to come out. So when Time Travelers Never Die auto-downloaded into my Kindle right before a flight to Australia, I was ecstatic. To date, Jack's creative, exciting, and fantanstical work had never disappointed.

To date that was.

Time Travelers Never Die is just about as boring as it gets. Unless you are a big history buff, it's hard to stay awake for this snoozer. There are huge long passages of the main characters rambling on and on with historical figures about things that do not further the plot line at all. Half way through the book I just started skimming through those passages. I actually stopped reading the book out of lack of interest about 2/3rds of the way through. I did eventually go back and finish it just in case it was one of those really slow to get to the good parts kind of books. I needn't have bothered.

The characters are flat and I never did get to the point where I cared if they lived or died. The whole timeline paradox thing had the potential to be interesting, but really just started to become annoying. It would have been really interesting to find out who or what was controlling the "death to those who mess with the timeline" principle but it was never addressed. Curiously, it didn't even seem like the characters were curious about it themselves.

As I said at the beginning, Jack McDevitt is a wonderful author. And I'm back to waiting with bated breath for his next book. But if you're just starting to get to know this author, please do yourself a tremendous favor and go back to the mid-1990's and read forward. You'll be enthralled and have a blast reading your way forward all the way to The Devil's Eye. But if you start with this sleeper, you'll probably lose interest in Jack McDevitt.

And that would be a sad, sad thing indeed.

In my mind Jack McDevitt seems to be the logical successor to Isaac Asimov; his books have consistently captivated my imagination with exciting plots and interesting characters. In spite of this book I still have high hopes for his future novels!

This book has neither an exciting plot nor interesting characters; I was surprised and disappointed but I stuck it out and finished the book. It's almost as if he didn't really know what to do with his storyline and tried experimenting with several alternatives, none of which worked successfully; some sections were particularly painful and preachy.

McDevitt has written many really good science fiction novels all of which I have enjoyed, most of them many times. This one was really off on a tangent and did not ever really come together for me. I kept hoping the next chapter would display the writer I respect so highly, but it never came.

I would not be sorry if he put this series behind him and got back to what he does best. Do not buy this book expecting classic Jack McDevitt; it represents a departure from his usual style and fails as an experiment.

While I fully understand the reasoning behind some of the negative reviews posted here, I came down in favor of this novel. So what if it's a bit light on the hard science (no attempt to explain the time travel devices) and so what if it all seems a bit silly at times, it's still a fun book.

The author tells a fine story of two friends bouncing around in history, meeting Aristotle, bumping into Shakespeare, hanging out in Alexandria's famed library, and so on. I don't know about you, but the author certainly tapped into one my reoccurring fantasies. My only complaints are that I wanted the characters to visit more places, meet more key figures, and I wanted more detail. In fairness, however, an author can only pack so much into three or four hundred pages.

I highly recommend this book to all. Just be clear that it's not going to blow you away with Kip Thornish ideas or Michio Kaku-like visions. Approach "Time Travelers Never Die" with the right attitude, however, and you will enjoy the ride.

--Guy P. Harrison, author of "Race and Reality" and "50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God"

Also check out: [[ASIN:0345460944 The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century: Stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Finney, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin,]]

and

[[ASIN:0812508645 Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus]]

If you have kids, you won't go wrong with these:

[[ASIN:1598898892 The Time Machine (Graphic Revolve)]]

and

[[ASIN:B00122SOLM The Time Machine (Great Illustrated Classics)]]

Jack McDevitt's work is normally so good, but this is just plain boring. And embarrassingly Americo-centric. Oh dear.

Well maybe two words: avoid / skip. I like McDevitts work, but like other reviewers, found it incredibly boring. Reminded me of playing catch-up for a linguistics test and having to read pages and pages of tedious words.

Having read and enjoyed several books by Jack McDevitt I had high hopes for this novel when I bought it. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. While the premise of the book was promising the plot was so thin as to be virtually non-existent. The action in the book was pedestrian and predictable. There was absolutely no suspense. Shel and Dave's encounters with historical figures were boring. I plowed through the novel hoping it would reach a climax worth the effort but the ending was at least as bad as the body of the novel.

I love good time travel stories but unfortunately this isn't one of them. McDevitt can and has done a lot better than this and I was pretty disappointed with this rambling book.I won't go into too much detail about the story but basically it concerns the disappearance of physicist Michael Shelborne. His son, Adrian (Shel) discovers while investigating the disappearance that his father has invented a time machine and appears to have gone back in time to an earlier era. No scientific discourse on how the time machine works is provided but that doesn't really matter. The time machines are about the size of Ipods and each time traveller has to have his own machine.

Shel enlists the aid of his friend Dave, a language expert, to go back into the past to search for his father and it's here that I found the main problem with this book. What I enjoy in many time travel stories is what I will call the clash of cultures. You would expect that when travelling hundreds of years in the past to be confronted with suspicion and superstitious dread in a completely alien civilization. Robert Silverberg does this very effectively in "Thebes of the hundred gates" for instance. This doesn't happen in this book. It doesn't matter whether Shel and Dave are traveling back to the 1960s civil rights marches or the library of Alexandria, all the characters sound the same. The visit to the library of Alexandria for instance sounds like a trip to your local lending library.

Anyway the story continues on is this way in a rambling fashion. Shel's father is located eventually but he wants to stay where he is. Sometimes they run into dangerous situations where a machine is lost, thus stranding the person concerned. This is usually resolved by a complex series of time jumping to get the machine back. Paradoxes don't seem to matter here. I kept hoping for something profound to happen but if it did I must have missed it.

Looking back over the many McDevitt books I have read I don't think I would rate any of them less than 3 stars. Time travelers never die is the exception and I eventually decided on two stars. In summary, a pretty weak effort from one of the best of the current hard sci fi authors.