Conrad's Time Machine
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
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....At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Since the publication of The Cross-Time Engineer in 1993, Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series about a bunch of socially immature male engineers has amused many readers, but this sloppy, adolescent prequel, which roughly explains the origin of the time machine featured in the other novels, is for die-hard fans only. Soon after leaving the U.S. Air Force in 1968, Tom Kolczyskrensi hooks up with two old college buddies, Jim Hasenpfeffer, a grad student about to get his doctorate in Behavioral Psychology, and Ian McTavish, a mechanical engineer at General Motors. (Tom himself is a college drop-out.) The three of them learn how to create a time machine and amass the financial wherewithal to build it. During a motorcycle vacation, they encounter a massive "implosion," which just happens to send out one intact piece of paper with electrical schematics and bits of humans. This fortuitous accident sets them on the way to wealth, health and unlimited sex with hosts of compliant and beautiful young women, the narration of which occupies more than a third of the novel. The story's opening postdates the end, highlighting the conventional time-travel paradoxes as well as most of the author's literary flaws, chiefly wooden, repetitive prose. In a foreword Frankowski informs the reader that he began the book as a high school student in the 1950s. It's too bad his more mature self apparently chose to finish it at the same level. FYI:The author currently lives in Tver, Russia, with his new bride.
