Born to Be Weird...
When Tom Kolczyskrenski got his discharge papers from the Air Force, he decided to look up his old pals—and the world would never be the same. At one time, the oddly mismatched trio had been roommates, then they'd gone their separate ways. Tom, for lack of money, enlisted in the Air Force to learn electronics. The other two had finished college, lan McTavish going into mechanical engineering and a job with GM, and Jim Hasenpfeffer into behavioral science, leading to his having gotten a Department of Defense grant to—this is serious stuff, now—study social interactions in motorcycle gangs.
So the three set out to be their own motorcycle gang. But these easy riders had barely begun to closely observe their own interactions when they ran across a strange perfectly hemispherical hole in the ground where a house used to be, with everything that had been in the sphere of influence slowly materializing in bits and pieces in the surrounding area. And they found the plans for the machine that had done this, and were sure they could duplicate it and get rich. But before long they would be wishing they had kept on being the three musketeers on bikes, instead of the three stooges of time travel....
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leo Frankowski is widely known for the popular "Cross-Time Engineer" series, which has gone through six novels to date, with translated editions in three languages. He is also the author of Copernick's Rebellion, a novel of a future based on a revolution in the biological sciences, of which The SF Site writes, "I have never read anything as original as Copernick's Rebellion , . . [it's] on my top 10 list." His other novels for Baen are A Boy and His Tank and The Fata Morgana. Frankowski was nominated for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer. He has held more than a hundred different positions, ranging from scientist in an electro-optical research lab to chief engineer to company president. His work in chemical and optical instrumentation has earned him several patents. Currently a writer and consulting engineer, he lives with his new Russian wife and teenage daughter in Tver, Russia.
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Product ReviewFrankowski has a knack for extrapolating a concept well into unexplored territory.
What makes his stories fun is how he is able to tell a tale working backwards - from the consequences of using a time machine to the logic that drove the choices made.
The characters in Conrad's Time Machine don't have a lot of depth, which isn't surprising given that the story is a major which fulfillment fantasy.
He's left some annoying loose ends and unexplored corridors, more in this book than others.
The ending he choose for this book surprised me as it was very unexpected and deeply poignant.Posted on
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Product ReviewI've read other books by Leo Frankowski and have enjoyed them a lot. According to the intro this story was his first attempt and then put away and returned to. And sadly it shows. I had a really hard time staying interested in the story or the main characters. The main characters are a bit two dimensional and larger to life and this really makes getting through the middle of the story difficult. The writing is first class and the ideas in the story are very interesting as are some of the moral implications. I just had a hard time finding the desire to want to turn the page and keep reading.
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Product ReviewAn unbelievable writer! All of his books are a desert! I cannot stop reading them, they were that good!
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Product ReviewGood read. I enjoyed it.
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