Omschrijving
My Time Machine unfolds across the socially and
politically confused landscape of early 2020, where
Carol Lay’s middle-aged female protagonist (who
bears a suspicious resemblance to the author)
embarks on a time-hopping odyssey that takes
her from the addled and anxious “contemporary”
America to the farthest reaches of time.
Finding the blueprints belonging to the eponymous Time Traveler
of H.G. Wells’ novel, our reluctant and all-too-human heroine
enlists her ex-husband Rob’s engineering genius in constructing
the same kind of machine capable of the same awesome power.
With a (more or less) functioning time machine at her disposal,
she decides there’s no better time to do her part to save humanity
from itself and starts looking for (figurative) butterflies to pin down
in hopes of altering the history of human civilization and averting
the impending effects of climate change.
Wary of causing unintended consequences by traveling into the
past to change history, she heads into the future, alone, to see if she
can gain any insights she can bring back to 2020 that could help change
the course of a world suffering from the reckless consequence of the
Anthropocene. She anticipates the worst, but that’s not quite bad
enough: Not only is there the ecological collapse she feared, but by
2035, America has devolved into a fascist state and by 2060 to full
blown totalitarianism. It appears environmental havoc is ineluctably
accompanied by political disaster.
My Time Machine is both a sly, cautionary political satire and a
rollicking time travel story, full of playful time travel paradoxes, edgeof-
your-seat suspense, breezy badinage, and a deeply felt wonder at
the universe. It is serious and funny, timely and timeless (literally).