Matt, graduate student in physics, tinkers with some apparatus at work. When he presses the RESET button, the machine disappears, and comes back a fraction of a second later. The next time it is gone for 10 seconds, and then 3 minutes. It turns out that Matt has accidentally created a time machine – but a one-way machine that only goes to the future. He figures out how to stay with the machine while it is gone, and goes off to the future himself. But the first few jumps go kind of wrong (taking him to unsuitable situations) so he jumps again to get away from them, getting further and further into the future. During one of the jumps, he gets a message that seems to be from his future self, so he figures that sometime in the future someone will come up with a way to travel backwards again, and goes looking for that solution.
The book was fun to read, but at the same time simple and shallow. Matt is a simple character with little depth. Despite being stranded in the future, he shows no fear, no anxiety, nor much of any other emotion. The various points in the future are not particularly exciting, and Matt always leaves so quickly that we don’t get to know much about them, or how the world got to that point. Halfway through the book a love interest is introduced. It sort of feels like a Hollywood version of SF. Easy entertainment.
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