Time Travelers Never Die

September 28, 2009
McDevitt (Seeker
) avoids flashy action scenes in this tale of two friends using a time machine to take a grand tour of history. When Adrian “Shel” Shelbourne's physicist father disappears and leaves behind a time-travel device, Shel and his friend Dave Dryden, a language expert, search for Shel's father in Galileo's Italy, Selma during the civil rights marches and other famous times and places. Realizing that time resists paradoxes and history can't be changed, the two friends seize the opportunity to live enriching, truly humane lives from Thermopylae to a few minutes in the future. As the paradoxes begin to pile up and their luck in dodging some of history's villains runs out, McDevitt ingeniously handles a tricky denouement that will leave readers satisfied.

October 15, 2009
Physicist Michael Shelborne's disappearance leads his son Shel and a linguist to discover his portable time machine and set off in search of him, interacting with times and places they had heretofore only dreamed of until Shel makes a cardinal mistake, forever changing his life. In a departure from his space-travel-oriented sf adventures such as his Priscilla Hutchins and his Alex Benedict novels, McDevitt touches upon a beloved sf theme. His approach, however, plays fast and loose with the paradoxes inherent in temporal interventions, while at the same time demonstrating the consequences of such recklessness. VERDICT This entertaining blend of sf classic and missing-persons drama is a good choice for most fans of hard sf or those fascinated by time travel.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2009
When scientist Michael Shelburne vanishes, his son AdrianShel to his friendssuspects unusual circumstances but not that his father has discovered the secret of time travel. Figuring it out, however, Shel and friend David Dryden use Michaels devices to find the missing man in a quest that takes them through Depression-era Philadelphia, Renaissance Italy, the bloody civil rights march at Selma, and the as-yet-unburned library of Alexandrias collection of the classical Greek dramatists. Eventually they succeed, but Shels curiosity spurs him to travel into the future, where he discovers his impending death, and then to search for a way to avoid that fate. That search occupies the books latter half and becomes a masterpiece of storytelling and exploration of the paradoxes of time travel. In fact, the whole book ranks very highly in McDevitts quarter-century of work distinguished by high intelligence, fine world building, and superb characterization.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)