March to Other Worlds Day 16: Tunnel Through Time by Lester Del Rey

Day 16: Tunnel through Time by Lester Del Rey

We’re marching through more portals in Lester Del Rey’s Tunnel through Time. I first read this novel when I found a copy in my grade school library. It’s an adventure story geared toward a younger audience told from the perspective of Bob Miller. Bob’s father has invented a time portal through which his close friend, a paleontologist, travels 80 million years into the past. Unfortunately, the paleontologist doesn’t return when the portal is turned back on sparking a crisis. After a couple of days of checking the equipment and worrying, 17-year-old Bob, and Pete, the teenaged son of the paleontologist, are chosen to go after him and find out what went wrong.

 

Obviously this decision on the part of the scientific team that invented the portal should require a substantial amount of disbelief by the reader, but it’s actually easy to get past as the boys begin their adventure. They find Pete’s father but the portal is damaged when a dinosaur stumbles into it and getting home quickly becomes a major problem. They can’t generate enough power to bring the three travelers back to the present in one jump. They can’t even generate enough power to let them jump together. So we get to visit more than the Cretaceous period. It was exciting when I was ten and it is still exciting now.

 

A final note of caution. Evidently, Lester Del Rey never read Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder even though it was published 14 years before this novel. Bob and his friends shoot and kill everything. They eat dinosaur eggs. They basically take no care to preserve the past at all and Del Rey never tries to deal with that potential problem. Now I personally think that if stepping on a butterfly could change the results of an election eighty million years later, than just breathing the air would have been a problem, but it still seems like Del Rey should have at least addressed the issue by throwing out some theory that the past is robust and can’t be affected by what time travelers are doing. That being said, I remembered these scenes vividly forty years later and especially the fate of the little girl, Gina. That’s saying quite a lot about a novel. This isn’t a great work of literature, but it’s a story that for me has withstood the passage of time.

 

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