Title The Man who Mastered Time Series --- Author Ray Cummings Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing 1924 Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Loto, George Main Elements Time Travel

Some travel through time in search of knowledge, or adventure, or a cure to mankind’s ills. For our protagonist, it’s a girl. But meeting the girl leads him to knowledge and adventure, if not to any kind of cure for anything--except the lack of a girl--so it’s ok!

This book was, well, the same as other Cummings books. Kind of goofy plots, the characters doing sort of dumb things, and much longer than it should be. I mean maybe it was a big deal way back when, but it hasn't aged well. Semi-helpless damsels in distress being rescued by the men who would woo them.

It ties in a bit with The Girl in the Golden Atom (which is about shrinking down to find a world inside a single atom) as the characters are the same. In fact even some characters from The Girl, now play a major role such as Lotto, the son of the main character in the other tale. But its not entirely consistent, George is still the "young man" from the first book, but with Lotto grown up, George can no longer be young. Plus he seems to have completely forgotten he had already found himself a girl, in fact a sister, of the protagonist's girlfriend, so he needs to get another one...maybe there's another tale to explain how he misplaced the first one. So I was just bothered by the fact there was consistency, and yet there wasn't (after all, you could have found yourself a new "young man").

I don't know what more to say, I could talk about plot and setting but I've yet to be impressed with what Cumming's has written. Again, if you were a teenage boy in the 1920's, this might have been a perfectly fine adventure story, and I'm not sure if the author was paid by the word, but the way it was written it kind of implied it was...well, I'll steal someone's comment from Goodreads since it kind of encapsulates it:

So, given all that, I'm not sure why anybody would fly across the millennia in a time machine to defend a culture like that -- except, of course, the promise of hot chicks at the end of it all.

For what its worth, Goodreads just had the one review and 12 ratings, maybe some things have faded into obscurity for a reason. Darn my stumbling across this for free on Kobo and then my obsessiveness to read a book to its finish for preventing me from just stopping in the middle (or ealier...why did I even start since I'd already experienced other Cummings tales?). Well, passed the time sitting in doctor's waiting rooms at least.

Oh...I read somewhere a discussion about time travel, where if you consider time just another dimension to travel through, you can move that way without moving in the others...except you can't. That spot on the Earth you were hovering over (they were using some kind of helicopter/plane thing) is rotating with the Earth, the Earth is moving around the sun, the sun is moving around the galaxy, and the galaxy is hurtling through space, at each level the speed increases significantly. So you'd have to calculate where "here" will be "then", and even if you could do the math, because you've sped up time, you'd have to move faster than light to get "there", or else find yourself in some random spot in the universe with the Earth nowhere in sight, or embedded inside another star's planet or something. And since you can't go faster than light...makes time travel rather harder to accomplish. An interesting though exercise. Of course that's why this is science fiction, its the "what if we did figure this out" kind of tale. Although you'd think we'd do something better than fighting a war that has nothing to do with us, just so you could bring a couple girls back to your own time (within a decade or two of going into an atom and bringing back a couple girls from there too). None of the girls from their own time and size good enough for them? And George, really, you needed one of each kind???