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    Time Travelers Never Die
    Time Travelers Never Die
    Time Travelers Never Die
    Audiobook13 hours

    Time Travelers Never Die

    Written by Jack McDevitt

    Narrated by Paul Boehmer

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    When physicist Michael Shelborne mysteriously vanishes, his son Shel discovers that he had constructed a time travel device. Fearing his father may be stranded in time-or worse-Shel enlists Dave Dryden, a linguist, to accompany him on the rescue mission.

    Their journey through history takes them from the Enlightenment of Renaissance Italy through the American Wild West to the civil rights upheavals of the twentieth century. Along the way, they encounter a diverse cast of historical greats, sometimes in unexpected situations. Yet the elder Shelborne remains elusive.

    And then Shel violates his agreement with Dave not to visit the future. There he makes a devastating discovery that sends him fleeing back through the ages and changes his life forever.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 25, 2010
    ISBN9781400184330
    Time Travelers Never Die
    Author

    Jack McDevitt

    Jack McDevitt is the author of A Talent for War, The Engines of God, Ancient Shores, Eternity Road, Moonfall, and numerous prize-winning short stories. He has served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, taught English and literature, and worked for the U.S. Customs Service in North Dakota and Georgia.

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    Reviews for Time Travelers Never Die

    3.5/5

    183 ratings25 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Rather light and fluffy science fiction, a bit like Bill & Ted minus the goofiness. There isn't much conflict driving the plot, just some adventuring and sight-seeing.
    • 4/5
      This was just a fun book, plain and simple, and a great read. I am a big fan of time-travel stories. Although not quite as much fun as Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine, the story itself was enjoyable. The character's romp through time is very much the kind of journey I'd want to take if I had access to a time machine. There were clever uses of time-travel paradoxes throughout the story, and it was fun feeling like I was getting to meet famous people from history. As far as time travel stories go, it was not on par with Robert Silverberg's Up the Line, but it was a lot of fun (a la Heinlein) and I'd recommend it to fans of time travel science fiction.
    • 5/5
      Very well written. A different take on what would you do if you had a Time Machine.
    • 5/5
      A rarity among time travel stories - no invading aliens, no split universes, no mentally messy paradoxes; just a very personal story about what two friends would do if they could go anywhen?
    • 3/5
      In as much as I didn't have much emotional investment in this book, I wasn't prepared to hammer what is basically a beach-read level of story, leaning on the day-dream level fantasy of time travel. However, the participants in my book group pointed out enough missed opportunities that I really can't go out of my way to even mildly recommend this novel.
    • 4/5
      When I read the collection of McDevitt's short fiction a week ago one of my favorite stories in it was the original novella 'Time Travelers Never Die' which closed the book. At least two of the stories from that collection became novels. I figured what the heck, lets read the novel now while the story is fresh and I'll see what he does with it. Well, at first this is like one of those times where you loved the book and went to see the movie, and it wasn't bad, but why did they change that part and why was all of that stuck in and why did ... OK, you get the idea. In short, the novella was really good and twisty - 4 stars for sure. The novel, well it begins the same and pretty much ends the same but the story got changed. There were some additions I enjoyed, parts that were mentioned in passing were shown in more depth, backstory fleshed out, technology changes accounted for, much more time travel such as traveling in time to the civil rights movement and and the Selma march led by John Lewis ... we visit notable people in history, and baseball games. That wasn't in the 1996 novella version but was added to the 2009 novel. In fact a lot of extra time trips are added. Eventually I was drawn into this version of the mystery which puts a different spin on events. It was interesting, but I think it lacked the tight intrigue of the original story. Nevertheless I increasingly warmed to the expanded story as I read along.So it was weird reading this - I knew how it was going to end (unless of course the author changed it) and the journey to get there was different, yet pretty good. In summary I liked the novella version a bit better. It kept the reader off balance and was a good tale. I can't tell how I'd react if I read the novel first. I think I'd love it. I'd recommend it to history fans who want a little science fiction. This is science fiction 'lite', a bit of fun. I would guess Dr. Who fans might love this. My one gripe is that I think the two main characters are pretty indistinguishable from each other much of the time.Oh, the end. It does indeed get to that same place. But then a few more pages are tacked on to give us something to think about.4 stars for the novella and the novel gets 3 1/2.
    • 3/5
      This was a quick read and I think was meant to be more of a fun adventure than anything. I did like all the historical visits. The ending however was very confusing. It was almost like a stage bow from all the main actors. All in all it was a fun book to read and did keep you wanting to know what would happen next.
    • 1/5
      Really poorly written book. More of a travelogue through the ages (then we visited Ben Franklin, then we saw Washington, etc., mind-numbing etc.) The ipod device for time travel was beyond hokey and there was nothing really imaginative in the plot. If you said it was written by a high school student I would have agreed.
    • 1/5
      Yes, I was very disappointed in this book. I've read other things by McDevitt which I enjoyed but there was very little enjoyment in this. Others have described the plot, such as it was, so I won't. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Shel and Dave are searching for Dave's father in time. They fined him about halfway through the book. He's found a nice place to live in the past and intends to stay there. How exciting. Then we have to get through the rest of the book, including more pointless time hopping. The book opens with Shel's death. We finally learn near the end that Shel isn't really dead (Time Travelers Never Die, remember?)but the way his death is faked is truly appalling. My fear is that McDevitt is setting this up to be a series. Based on the ending, it could go either way. I won't be reading them.
    • 5/5
      I like time travel books and this one is no exception. McDevitt writes the novel in a light yet very interesting way, just as if he actually did write a work of fiction but it's in reality the only way to tell his actual adventures!

      The basic plot deals with Shel, a man who has just died (or has he?) and is narrated by his friend Dave. We find that Shel discovered his dad's time travel device with explicit instructions to destroy it. Rather than do that, Shel and later Dave discover the time stream. They also find that they're prevented from creating a time paradox. If you create one, you die! Oops!

      What was most fascinating about the book for me was the meeting with various historical figures. Some such as Socrates' hemlock maneuver (sorry, couldn't resist that one!) was a bit lighter than they assumed. They made friends with the head librarian at the Library at Alexandria before its burning and recorded many lost books on their digital devices. And they met some evil figures from history as well with predictable results such as their encounter with Cesar Borgia, the Inquisitor.

      The subplot of discovering lost Greek plays and giving them anonymously to a Greek scholar was interesting but McDevitt was not developing that much and I think that's very too bad. I liked that thread very much.

      Rather, this is a story of best friends, how they deal with this gift, the search for their father and also a search for a purpose to their lives, which seem pretty mundane after getting to know Columbus or Hemingway or going to parties with Ben Franklin or confronting racism at the march at Selma.

      Great insight into history and a realization of how rich we had it and what riches are to come. A must-read!


    • 2/5
      Nothing new here... Same old time traveling story one has read/saw in every other medium. Disappointed to say the least.
    • 2/5
      Jack McDevitt's work is clever. It addresses issues of paradox rather originally, as far as I've seen, and offers some insight into an eternal view of history.

      However, the work is plagued by a number of errors that, I imagine, only experts could discover. His Greek transliteration is poor, writing iotai as Ys and upsila as Is, and ignoring rough breathings here or soft breathings there. His grasp of Greco-Roman culture, especially religion, is tenuous at best: Jupiter is the Roman king of the gods, a name which would not be applied in Alexandria (officially or otherwise) for at least seventy years after the visit by Shel and Dave in the story... and he certainly would not be associated with Hera, the Greek queen of the gods (whose Roman counterpart was, rather, Juno). Further, prayer in ancient culture, certainly not at the time of the Trojan War, never involved kneeling or bowing before the gods, and a classicist like the character Aspasia would have known that.

      McDevitt's view of religion in general is remarkably one-sided, only offering a small potential that any good could come of it at all, and then only if religion were libertarian politically - a small group led by a single individual. By implication, any religion that suggested authority was authoritarian, corrupt, and damaging to society. His history of religion, too, has holes large enough to drive a Buick through.

      I am not an expert in every historical era and political issue that McDevitt addresses in this ambitious work, but of those things I am knowledgeable about, McDevitt's attempts are sloppy at best and flatly ignorant at worst.

      On top of all of that, McDevitt's - as I said earlier, rather original - approach to paradox hinges upon a significant flaw of reasoning: McDevitt indicates that any event which is KNOWN in history cannot be altered. By that measure, someone completely ignorant of history, or someone misled about the details of history, could travel to any time and do anything at all - including things that would be paradoxical for a more knowledgeable person.

      My final complaint: the encounter with Socrates is notable, not because of its moving speeches or discussion, but because it is markedly absent from the problems that plague Shel and Dave throughout the book: no one knows exactly when Hamlet was first produced, or what exact date Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses, but Dave can show up at Socrates' death with precise certainty? The death of a man some scholars believe never to have existed? It is surprising, at least.

      This book had a great deal of potential as I went into reading it. It got my hopes up, that someone might have done a grand time-traveling adventure through history with precision alongside a riveting original tale. But the simple errors that riddled the book compelled me to read the last ten chapters in one sitting, just to get it over with.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating look at time travel, its paradoxes, and some key figures and events in our history to date. An entertaining, engaging novel.
    • 2/5
      Probably the most boring and/or idiotic time travel book ever written.

      Dave and Shel are time travelling buddies... until Shel mysteriously dies/disappears. So then we're taken back in the story to how these two dudes end up time travelling. Shel has a physicist dad (Michael) goes missing. Shel investigates, and while investigating is lucky enough to have his father leave him time travelling devices that looks like iPods ... I mean "qPods"... Dad apparently disappeared doing the time travel thing and now we need to go find him. The first chunk of the novel is Shel enlisting his buddy Dave (who can speak multiple languages, and is therefore useful) to frat-party around the timeline "looking" for Shel's father. Then, with that mystery solved, they frat party around the time line some more. Oh but wait! We're back to Shel's death. So we do some time line kerfluffling with that for a bit. Stuff happens. The end.

      I was so bored with this novel. Here's a book about TIME TRAVEL! Awesome! No, Dave and Shel just make a random list of shit they want to see, and they zap about the time line watching. No interesting information happens, no new "facts" come to light. McDevitt could have had fun, could have at least pulled some alternative theories into some of the things that happen, but he doesn't. Everything that we think might have conventionally happened did... just like we thought they did. It's like he was remembering bits from his high school world history book and just strung them together in some sort of weak-sauce story. The only interaction with history was a B-story subplot that's never really developed. I'm not even sure why it's in the book.

      The time travel paradox was just weird. If something was known to the travellers to have happened, they could not change it. So if you knew that something happened, went back to change it, you have a heart attack. It's just not allowed ("Cardiac principle"... really). So then these numbskulls go Google anything they're trying to figure out (you know, like going to Google to see if it played out how they were hoping, which is stupid, because then they're STUCK with that timeline). Alternatively, I suppose that means that some ignoramus could go back in time and change anything. So, really, Shel could know something, have Dave go back in time and change it... but they never do that either. Something interesting could have happened, but apparently that might have not been allowed according to the physics in this book's universe, too.

      These little iPod time travelling devices not only move one through time, but through space as well, so, say someone encounters a locked door, they can just set their time travelley dealio to 5 minutes ago, on the other side of the door and unlock it for themselves in the future. Yeehaw. And yet? Still no fun!

      McDevitt gets a bunch of little things wrong (or at least, he got a lot of little things wrong about stuff I know more about, there is plenty of history I'm ignorant about and I'm sure he either got that perfect or didn't)... and he was inconsistent. Shel and Dave will zap themselves silly looking for something historical that's not nailed down and never catch it, but then zap themselves *perfectly* to another event that is also not known, too. It's just weird. Easy plot device, I suppose. It feels like cheating, here, though.

      And we won't into how they are waltzing all over the past (from ancient Alexandria and forward) showing off their Blackberries Gooseberries and time travelling iPods qPods to every single person they meet. They even took freakin' pictures with everyone. W. T. F. So stupid. So damned stupid.

      They never covered the distant past (dood, dinosaurs!!!) and they barely touched on the future. So again, I feel cheated with anything interesting.

      The only smart thing either of them did was make some money by either playing the ponies (zapping to the future to discover the results) or going to the past to buy artwork before it's famous.

      I have to say, I'm also surprised at the publication date of this novel. It felt old and dated. Maybe it's the lack of women as anything but relationship/sex material... maybe it's the frat boy attitude... I don't know, it's just felt a lot older than it is.

      Big disappointment. It wasn't terrible, it was just dumb.
    • 3/5
      Competent but in the end not particularly imaginative story about two very conventional upper middle class american men who get their hands on a time machine and use it to go sightseeing into the past. Where oddly, they meet a lot of other men who might as well be conventional upper middle class americans except some of them are wearing togas or periwigs or hose. I kept checking the publication date because I felt so strongly that it was a reprint of a pulp novel from the fifties. On that level it worked pretty well and had a certain nostalgic Disney Hall of the Presidents charm.
    • 3/5
      I found the plotting a bit tedious, but enough to get me through. What I found really annoying was the fact that all the historical figures acted just like 20th century people. There was no sense that ideas about culture change. McDevitt also does this in the Alex Benedict stories, where I can accept it as a world-building short-cut. But here I just found it inexcusable.
    • 4/5
      I’ve noticed with this book, some readers were miffed as there is no ‘real villain’ of the book. This was fine by me. There’s no need for antagonists in every book read. I really enjoyed reading this one, the time travel was excellent and it made a real good adventure/science fiction book to read. The plot was good. It flowed and didn’t stop until at least towards the end. I really did enjoy the time traveling aspect of the story. Being a history lover myself, I loved how Shel and Dave traveled through different time periods where important historical events had happened it made for very interesting and sometimes dangerous or funny reading. I cringed when Dave was asked to join in the adventure, because I knew something bad was going to happen. (Something did happen, but am not going to reveal to keep this review spoiler free). There was a mini mystery plot with this book, (regarding Shel’s father) and although it was interesting, I found I preferred reading the time traveling part much more and the mystery part followed after - it just didn’t seem as important, at least it felt that way while reading the book. Once the mystery was solved, it wasn’t what I thought it would be. I expected a little more drama, maybe some action but it wasn’t the case. So, I was mildly disappointed. It still did not deter me from enjoying this book though.The characters were all right, nothing out of the ordinary or special. I actually enjoyed how Dave developed through the book more than Shel. His small love story was touching and provided a nice tender moment of the storyline. I’d have to say Dave is the most exciting character to follow between the two and although Shel becomes more interesting later on, I preferred them traveling together instead of separately.Also, I have to note, I loved the ending of the book. It just seemed like such a perfect ending and one of the best I have read so far this year. I do admit, I did expect some sort of catastrophic event to happen. Yet I found that by the time I was finishing the book, it was a nice satisfying adventure to read. I think this is a perfect read for even those not really into science fiction but would love to read a great adventure as well!
    • 3/5
      Science fiction is a genre I’ve fall out with, not intentionally, it somehow just happened over the years. Lately I’ve wanted to get reacquainted and this was my first foray back into science fiction.After Michael Shelbourne, a well-known physicist, goes missing, his son Shel finds out he developed and successfully used a time machine. Concerned his father may be stuck in another time without means to get home, he convinces his friend Dave Dryden, to help him search for his father.The story was good enough but it felt sort of, well, it was a lot less complicated than I thought the story would be especially for a time travel story. His father goes missing and Shel, rightfully distraught, goes to find him and along the way there are several interesting adventures but it felt like there was no urgency to the story. Shel and Dave do land in a few messes which is expected when time traveling but they all too easily get out of it simply by setting one of the devices to go back and put together a rescue. Poof, they get out of trouble, no harm done. There is a time paradox that comes into play but neither Shel nor Dave seemed all that concerned about it so I wasn’t either. However, I wanted the whole time travel aspect to be more complicated but all of it started to feel a little vacationy to me --- the two take trips to party with Voltaire and watch plays in Ancient Greece and while it’s fun, there just doesn’t feel like there’s enough conflict.This isn’t a negative review though. McDevitt is a fun writer and while this book wasn’t a total score for me, it made me wonder about some of his other books so I think I’ll be giving him another opportunity to impress me.
    • 4/5
      As I see it, there are two basic types of time-travel books: the 'big picture' time-travel novel wherein the fate of the universe is at stake; and the smaller-scale time-travel novel that is out there just for fun. One of the best of the latter is also one of my favorite novels, The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein. The Door into Summer is a good romp and a fun ride. This is not 'big issues' SF, but enjoyable. I've read the book at least 20 times and plan to do so just as many again through the rest of my life. Jack McDevitt's latest, Time Travelers Never Die, is also one of these fun time-travel adventures (regardless of what the back-cover copy tries to make it out to be).Physicist Adrian Shelborne's father has disappeared, strangely vanishing from his home which is locked from the inside and shows no sign of forced entry. As Adrian and his brother Jerry begin to believe their father has actually died, Adrian (known more affectionately as 'Shel') receives a letter that his father left with his lawyer, informing him that he should not expect to see him again and asking him to destroy three hand-held computers ('Q-pods') that are in a safe. Before destroying them, however, Shel plays around with one and discovers that they are actually time machines that his genius father has invented.Shel quickly realizes that his father has disappeared into the time stream and is most likely stuck somewhere in the past. Shel enrolls the help of his long-time best friend, Dave Dryden, and the two of them head off on a series of adventures throughout the time stream while looking for the senior Shelborne. One thing Dave and Shel have promised each other, though, is that they will not use the time machines to travel into the future, but of course, neither holds to that promise. Eventually, though, Shel learns about his premature death and goes on the run through time to avoid ending up at the time and place in which he dies. It's then up to Dave to figure out how he can keep Shel from dying without creating a paradox with known history.Even though there's a cover blurb by Joe Haldeman claiming that this book 'ring[s] in new changes in the genre,' there's nothing really new in Time Travelers Never Die, but that doesn't mean it's not a good book: it is so excellently written that I found myself reading the entire book in two days, carving out every spare minute from my busy schedule to read at least one more page, and usually a lot more than that!McDevitt's plot, while not too complex, is still finely woven and paced. He drops Shel and Dave into one temporal adventure (and mis-adventure!) again and again without feeling repetitive. There's just enough of an over-arching storyline to keep the adventures focused, but not so much that you feel the adventures are there for the sake of the story, even though in the end, when all is revealed, you can see McDevitt's master plotting. I've not read any other of Jack McDevitt's novels, but based on the craftsmanship in this one, I'm definitely going to hunt them down and begin reading them.
    • 3/5
      I liked the geeky scholarly side of it, but the story is kind of tedious and the characters are very one dimensional throughout
    • 4/5
      Time travel is a tricky subject. There are so many variations on the theme, with so many potential difficulties, that it can be challenging to present it in a truly believable way. Now, I'm the sort of reader who's willing to set nitpicky details aside if the story is engaging enough, which almost certainly plays into my feelings on this book.'Time Travelers' tells the story of buddies Shel and Dave as they journey through the ages. At first on a quest to locate Shel's father, eventually it turns into an eon-spanning vacation of sorts, with stops around the world. It's quite fun joining them as they attend numerous historical events and visit with people like Aristotle and Voltaire. A few mind-bendy twists, the angles that time travel is so good at providing, occur later in the book, adding to the fun. McDevitt's writing style is, as always, warm and engaging, very reader-friendly. Its safe to say that, if not particularly intellectually stimulating, its a quick, easy and enjoyable read. I suspect many of the time travel details would fall apart under close scrutiny. If you're sensitive to such things, I don't think this book will be your cup of tea. But if you're mostly just interested in a fun story about likeable individuals having fantastic experiences that the rest of us can only dream about, this book fills that niche neatly.
    • 4/5
      This time travel romp is a pleasant read, but there isn't much to it. A brilliant physicist invents a time machine (called a "converter" for no apparent reason - it looks like an oversized iPod), vanishes and leaves it behind for his less brilliant son, along with an exhortation to pound it into rubble and dump the pieces into the deepest part of the ocean. Naturally, the son does no such thing. He and his best friend are soon off playing temporal tourists.Such challenge as the plot presents involves, first, the search for the vanished father and, second, the son's death in an arson-murder. Neither creates any dire difficulties. The perils that the father warned against never come to the surface. One of the heroes is beaten by police in Selma in 1965. The other suffers torture at the hands of Caesar Borgia. Neither comes close to annihilating the space-time continuum. At the end, I thought, This is like the roller coaster in an amusement park: The danger is all safe and synthetic. That's fine for Coney Island, not what one hopes for in a novel.As a quondam classicist, I was annoyed by a succession of slips. Plutarch didn't write in Latin. Greeks didn't wear togas. Demosthenes didn't exhort the Athenians to go to war with Alexander. Philos and phylos are not the same word, and substituting the latter for the former produces the Hillary-like sentiment, "The tribe is a second self."Nonetheless, as I said, the book races along, the characters are somewhat interesting, and paradoxes are handled without awkwardness. For fans of its subgenre, it is worth a spare afternoon.
    • 5/5
      If time travel is really possible, then all events, all people, and even everything before humans, throughout time are always there to experience. It’s a fascinating concept and one that I have always been captivated by. Therefore, it is no surprise that I very much enjoyed Jack McDevitt’s Time Travelers Never Die. McDevitt has created a very interesting story about two friends in 2018, David Dryden, a language professor, and Adrian Shelborne, a former physicist, who acquire two small devices from Shel’s father, who has disappeared. They soon discover that the devices are time machines and they realize that Shel’s father was probably stranded somewhere in time. Their decision to try to rescue him begins what might be described as a very interesting travelogue that includes many historical events and conversations with many famous historical people. Finding Shel’s father turned out to be more difficult than they anticipated, but they also visited times and places that satisfied their own curiosity. After all, the time machines meant there was no hurry to rescue Shel’s father. He would always be somewhere in time for them to find eventually. As might be expected of two well educated men, they begin visiting times, events, and meeting people of historical significance, beginning with the “Bloody Sunday” march for equality in Selma Alabama in 1965 where Shel had to rescue Dave from jail. They met Aldous Huxley in 1937, Thomas Paine in 1777, and Gallileo in 1640. They attended the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, were in New York City on VJ Day in 1945, and they were in the stands when Babe Ruth called his home run in Wrigley Field in 1932. They also visited many other times historical and future times. As a university librarian for more than 30 years, I enjoyed McDevitt’s descriptions of their visits to the great library in Alexandria in 149 B.C. I liked his description of the library as a comfortable, inviting place for local woman and children as well scholars. I also was amused that Shel and Dave were not permitted to see three Sophocles’ plays in the library at the same time (only two at a time) unless they were members of the Benefactors’ Society. Actually the library and Sophocles played an interesting role in the book. The book certainly included more than descriptions of time-travel experiences. It is also a story of how time-travel changed the lives of Dave and Shel. They also had to use the time machines to resolve many dangerous situations and they faced many time paradox issues. The story defines a time paradox as “when you make an event know to have occurred impossible.” I found McDevitt’s treatment of the paradox issues to be very creative and satisfying, although it did seem that Dave and Shel really pushed the paradox limit. If I had to find a disappointing aspect to this book, I would say McDevitt briefly described too many time-travel experiences. I might have preferred more detailed and revealing descriptions of fewer time-travel experiences. However, McDevitt obviously did much research and his brief descriptions of the many historical characters and settings where quite interesting. Again, I enjoyed this book very much.
    • 4/5
      I have been reading science fiction since I was 12 (57 years), but this was the first book by Jack McDevitt. It won't be the last. A very satisfying read, one that begs for a sequel. Too bad; it appears that McDevitt doesn't write sequels. The book is filled with delightfully described zippings around in time. He has a knack for making it seem possible.
    • 4/5
      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.