John E. Stith is a Colorado-born author who specializes, with much success, in the realm of science fiction. He is especially adept at weaving together the best elements of mysteries while building interesting and well-rounded characters to populate the worlds of his imagination.

John E. Stith

Tiny Time Machine: The Complete Trilogy represents Stith’s foray into writing for the Young Adult market, with mixed results at achieving some of the above characteristics.

The story primarily belongs to Meg Vauntage, 16 years old and ready to rebel.  Meg’s father Frederick is perfecting, and testing, a device that can generate a small time portal, housed in what looks like a cellphone. We meet Meg, who is in the process of breaking into a pest control company’s property in order to vandalize their trucks in protest of their practices. Although Meg doesn’t know it yet, 17-year-old Josh Underhill is inside at the same time, making his own protest by releasing thousands of cockroaches in the main office.

We never find out which one tripped the alarm, but both are taken into custody by the police, leading to a “meet cute” in the backseat of a squad car. They part ways after the extermination company decides to not press charges, but soon they’re bumping into each other again, literally, in the dark corners of a paint factory they both suspect of dumping toxic waste into the local water system. It’s no surprise that they’re quickly discovered and they bicker and bond as they flee the scene together.

Meg realizes they’re near her father’s laboratory, which she believes will be an excellent place to stop, catch their breath and regroup. When they arrive, they find her father on the floor in a spreading pool of blood. He regains consciousness just long enough to shove a cellphone into her hands and instruct her to read the files, before he dies.

Because they’ve already had two encounters with the police in the last few hours, Meg and Josh bolt from the scene, believing if they stay they’ll be falsely accused of killing her father, since they’re covered in his blood. This rapid series of events sets the pace for the rest of the first novella in the trilogy.

Their first experimentation with the tiny time machine sends Meg and Josh approximately 30 years into the future, into a landscape they  barely recognize. Desolate and almost empty of human habitation, they begin to research what could have happened in a mere three decades. Their research leads them to a gray, oddly gelatinous Pacific ocean, and they race to find the triggering event from their own time.

There are several paradoxes surrounding the idea of time travel, and Stith does a nice job of providing a reasonable path forward through the various conundrums. There is much detail about how time travel works, how this particular portal works, its size limitations and what happens when the portal closes. In the third novella, Mother of Invention, there are a lot of details about moving back and forth, both in time and in space, but the explanation makes sense even when the pace accelerates.

If you’re already a fan of Stith’s work, as I am, you might experience a little disappointment that the characters aren’t as fully realized in these novellas as they are in most of his other works. It feels as though perhaps because the main characters are young adults (16, 17 and 18), they aren’t given detailed lives with more than one interest. They do not seem to have much going on outside of the immediate problem, as if they didn’t fully exist before they met each other and fell into the configurations of the tiny time machine.

Another aspect of the book feels outdated, and that’s the interaction between the three main characters—Meg, Josh and their super-wealthy friend, Olivia. From the moment Olivia is introduced, Meg can only see her as competition for Josh. It’s a literary trope that’s outdated and it doesn’t add anything to the story. Meg never once considers that this young woman could provide friendship and support, despite the fact that she could use a large dose of both of those things. If you wanted to take it a step further, Meg could be the one attracted to Olivia. Or Olivia could be interested in Meg, and Josh could be the jealous party. Or how about if Olivia is grateful that they saved the world, and maybe isn’t sexually attracted to either of them? Maybe Meg could blame Josh for ogling Olivia, instead of placing the blame on how Olivia dresses. Certainly, as an 18-year-old male, Josh has encountered women in figure-flattering clothing before now.

With an interesting plot and a quick-moving pace, the Tiny Time Machine trilogy contains decent stories that unfortunately fall back on clichéd relationships among its characters. It also leans heavily into a happy-ever-after vibe, which makes the book feel skewed toward a younger audience, despite some very mild, off-screen sex scenes.