SCIENCE FICTION

The Accidental Time Machine

By Joe Haldeman. Ace, $23.95

When MIT graduate assistant Matt Fuller presses the button on a measuring device in the lab, the small apparatus disappears for just a second. He tries again, and the device disappears for a few seconds more. Eventually, Matt figures out that the machine and any metallic items it's in contact with are traveling to the future.

With his own life in disarray, Matt decides to hop to the future along with his "accidental time machine." In successive time jumps, the hapless physicist finds himself in a fundamentalist Christian world where the Second Coming has occurred, a land ruled by eBay-like consumerism and a nearly barren planet. Along the way, he meets the woman of his dreams.

The problem is that, while traveling to the future is easy enough, it seems there's no way for Matt and his new love to get back to the past.

Final word: Haldeman, who has five Hugo Awards and four Nebulas under his belt, offers one of the most fun time-travel stories ever.

- Mark Graham

YOUNG ADULT

The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

By Michael Scott. Delacorte, $16.99, ages 12 and up

Pegged to be Delacorte's breakout book of the summer, this first book in Scott's six-part fantasy-adventure series imagines a world where mythical beings secretly live among us. Set in modern-day San Francisco, 15-year-old twins Sophie and Josh get tangled in a centuries-old quest to guard the legendary book of Abraham the Mage, said to hold the secret to immortality, only to discover they may be the key to protecting it.

Evil Doctor John Dee has stolen all but the last two pages of the book from 600-year-old Alchemyst Nicholas Flamel and his wife, and if he manages to get those, too, the Dark Elders could destroy humankind. Unwittingly allied with Flamel and an ancient warrior, the twins are pitted against brutish mud men, swarms of killer crows and evil goddesses in familiar Bay Area locales, and a shadowy realm that humans rarely enter.

Final word: The series, already optioned for film by New Line Cinema, is a mythology lover's dream come true, with all conceivable beings converging to control the fate of the world.

- Jennifer Miller