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The Invention of Everything Else.

Article Excerpt
The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt, Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24.

Sway, by Zachary Lazar, Little, Brown, 2008, $23.99.

"DISCONTINUITY GIRL"

TIME TRAVEL is so stressful. For starters, you have to keep track of blackout dates. No Hawaiian vacations in late 1941; forget about London during autumn 1666; and unless your plague vaccinations are up to date, the entire 14th century is out. Once you reach your destination, there's so much to remember. Don't step on any wildlife. Don't kill your grandfather. Don't sleep with your grandmother. Packing is a nightmare--what do you bring for the Later Cretaceous? Were bustles in or out in 1873?

And don't even think about bringing back any souvenirs.

On the page, of course, time travel has its rewards, in particular for writers. Historical research itself is a form of time travel. Total immersion in the books and ephemera of a period; visiting sites where major events occurred or interesting people lived; fingering the clothing and everyday objects of another time--this kind of work is magical, intoxicating. When done well, it results in alternate timelines that challenge us to reexamine the history of our own world: books like Bruce Sterling's and William Gibson's The Difference Engine; James Morrow's The Last Witchfinder; Lisa Goldstein's The Dream Years; John Crowley's Aegypt sequence and The Evening Land; Christopher Priest's superb, minatory The Prestige and The Separations. Time travel and alternate history work especially well as fictional or cinematic early-warning systems, sounding the tocsin for human hubris (and stupidity) and technological peril: witness H. G. Wells's The Time Machine; Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"; Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five; Chris Marker's influential short film La Jetee and its homage, Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. In a more personal vein, temporal adjustment allows us to indulge all our best and worst what-if scenarios, as in Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol;" Jack Finney's "The Third Level" and Time And Again; Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife; Groundhog Day and the Back to the Future franchise, among myriad others. The Invention of Everything Else, Samantha Hunt's disappointing new novel, juggles many of these elements--time-out-of-joint romance; fascinating historical figures; a homemade time machine--and manages to drop every single one of them.

Its quirky setup sounds appealing enough. In 1943 Manhattan, Louisa, a young chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker, meets the eighty-six-year-old Nikola Tesla, the hotel's longterm and impecunious resident oddball, and the two bond over a shared affection for homing pigeons. If he were around today, the Serbian-born Tesla would totally...

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