Friday, September 26, 2008
Tunnel Through Time
by Lester del Rey
I literally picked this one up off the sidewalk. One evening whilst out strolling, we came a cross a neighbor's house with boxes of books for the taking sitting out along the sidewalk. It looks like the St. Alphonsus School Library was cleaning house and didn't feel like sending someone all the way down to the Goodwill. Anyway, I tell you this to explain why I bothered to read this particular book. Tunnel Through Time is a science fiction tale written for kids. Bob Miller is the seventeen-year-old son of a physicist who's invented a method of time travel. His dad has convinced a paleontologist, Doc Tom, to make the first trip into the past. Doc Tom insists on pushing the machine to the limits, going back in time 80 million years. When he doesn't return, Bob and Doc's son, Pete, convince Dr. Miller to send them back as a rescue party. So begins a teen-age adventure in time. As time travel tales go, I found this one to be pretty lame. 'Tis a thinly veneered science lesson, imparting the latest paleontology information from the mid-1960s. The whole plot was also pretty hard to swallow. Maybe when I was a kid I would have found the tale believable, but nowadays I know that in the real world, Doc Tom wouldn't have even gotten near the time machine until it had been properly debugged. If then. Ah, well. It was a historical curiosity, if nothing else.
'Tis just waiting room material.
LibraryThing link
I literally picked this one up off the sidewalk. One evening whilst out strolling, we came a cross a neighbor's house with boxes of books for the taking sitting out along the sidewalk. It looks like the St. Alphonsus School Library was cleaning house and didn't feel like sending someone all the way down to the Goodwill. Anyway, I tell you this to explain why I bothered to read this particular book. Tunnel Through Time is a science fiction tale written for kids. Bob Miller is the seventeen-year-old son of a physicist who's invented a method of time travel. His dad has convinced a paleontologist, Doc Tom, to make the first trip into the past. Doc Tom insists on pushing the machine to the limits, going back in time 80 million years. When he doesn't return, Bob and Doc's son, Pete, convince Dr. Miller to send them back as a rescue party. So begins a teen-age adventure in time. As time travel tales go, I found this one to be pretty lame. 'Tis a thinly veneered science lesson, imparting the latest paleontology information from the mid-1960s. The whole plot was also pretty hard to swallow. Maybe when I was a kid I would have found the tale believable, but nowadays I know that in the real world, Doc Tom wouldn't have even gotten near the time machine until it had been properly debugged. If then. Ah, well. It was a historical curiosity, if nothing else.
'Tis just waiting room material.
LibraryThing link
Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial
// posted by John @ 5:33 PM 
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