Tunnel Through Time

by Lester del Rey

Go backward through space-time into prehistory? It seemed fantastic, but the machine -- invented by Bob's father in connection with his research on the interrelation of time and gravity -- actually existed. Bob and his friend Pete are anxious to be the first to visit the era of the dinosaurs. Overruled, they watch Pete's father, a famous paleontologist, step into the shimmering ring -- and disappear into the past. But when he does not return on schedule because the machine jams, Bob and Pete follow on a daring rescue mission...

A thrilling time-travel adventure as only master storyteller Lester del Rey could tell it!

Genres: Science Fiction, Time Travel, Fiction, Young Adult, Childrens, Middle Grade, Fantasy

120 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Lester del Rey was an American science fiction author and editor. Del Rey is especially famous for his juvenile novels such as those which are part of the Winston Science Fiction series, and for Del Rey Books, the fantasy and science fiction branch of Ballantine Books edited by Lester del Rey and his fourth wife Judy-Lynn del Rey.

Also published as:
Philip St. John
Eric van Lihn
Erik van Lhin
Kenneth Wright
Edson McCann (with Frederik Pohl)

Reviews

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the books that my dyslexic brother read voluntarily when he was in elementary school, so I figured it had to be pretty gripping. He read it more than once. Back in 67, when it came out, dinosaurs were big news as more and more fossils came to light all over the world. He told everyone he wanted to be a paleontologist and read everything he could get his hands on to do with them.
A few weeks ago I came across A Wrinkle in Time and thought it was the book my brother had loved so much. Uh...no. Then I remembered the correct title! Totally different premise, totally different book. And yes, it was gripping, to the place that I had to put it up the first night I started it, because I knew if I didn't I'd just read it straight through and go to bed at 2 AM with a raging headache! Science fiction, indeed. But I can imagine the effect it had on my brother at the time.

Boy times have changed, haven't they? The main characters are boys in their teens and they call adult men "sir" (even their own fathers), and obey without backtalk. The scientists see no contradiction between scientific research and belief in "the good Lord", prayer and blessings. (I don't, either.) It's interesting to see how things have changed in scientific thought, too--Doctor Tom mentions the idea that brontosaurii had two small brains, one in the head and one in the backside, as if it were fact. That idea was junked decades ago.

If you're going to go hopping back to Prehistory, I guess it makes sense to carry rifles and sidearms, but true to the Cold War ethos of the time when it was written, modern man uses his guns to solve all his problems--though one wonders how much effect a puny little pistol bullet would have on a great big ol' dino. The dinosaurs are repeatedly described as "wicked" and "with evil intent", though I doubt they had any emotions, let alone moral standpoints. At one point our young hero, Bob, shoots at a pteranodon, and says "It was like sitting in on the act of creation itself." Yeah--because killing something is an act of creation! But it chimes with all those sci-fi movies of the period.

It made me chuckle to find pronunciation guides incorporated into the text, so child readers could get their heads around names like "archeopteryx", but at least the author tried to make them kind of unobtrusive--unsuccesssfully, as it happens. At least I finally found out what the Megatherium was.

If I have one complaint it was that the book chops off suddenly. I guess that meant I wanted more! But in those days, chapter books for kids were kept below 100 pages if at all possible. This led to a lot of rushed endings and silly coincidental rescues, which this book has in plenty. However, I honestly could not put it down and was sorry when I realised I'd eaten it all.

[Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very intrigued by the traveling back in time such a long time ago and was definitely not disappointed. The only thing I didn't like was that it ended to quickly. Found it to be an fun and interesting story

[Tomislav]

Second read – 1 July 1990. Read to my 4-year-old son, who couldn’t really follow the story.

First read – 1 May 1967. Ordered from Scholastic Book Services in my 7th grade school class.

[Robert Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of my favorites back when I was about eight years old. Maybe my first SF. I still have my forty-year-old copy, and just read it to my seven-year-old son, a chapter at a time, at bedtime. He liked it too. Maybe some day he'll read it to his son.

[Christine Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book!

I've loved this book since I was very young, about 5th grade, at about 1967. I just read it again.

[Jeff Dickison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young adult science fiction book and my rating is made with that in mind. Two young men must go back in time to rescue the father of one of them. They wind up in several different era, but the dinosaur age is the best one. Recommended to young people.

[Heather D-G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Letting my nine-year old rate this one. He's much more the target audience for this SF vintage middle-grade novel from 1966. We read this out loud, a chapter or two at a time, just before bed. It's *Land of the Lost* meets *Stargate*, and is filled with golden-age goodness and quite a bit of outdated dinosaur speculation. Lots of fun, especially if you don't try to judge it by today's standards. Lester Del Rey (better known for his editing and still-going-strong SF publishing imprint) has another book in this Scholastic Book Services series, titled *The Runaway Robot* (doesn't that sound like a hoot?). We'll be keeping an eye out for it. Recommended for fans of vintage SF.

[دانیال بهزادی · Rating 3 out of 5]

‫خب کتاب بی‌شک برای ردهٔ سنی نوجوان نوشته شده بود. البته از پیش هم انتظارش رو داشتم و عاملی که باعث شد این کتاب رو بخونم، خاطرهٔ خوب دوران کودکیم از خوندن کتاب روبوت فراری از همین نویسنده بود. شاید اگه این کتاب روهم در همون زمان می‌خوندم، لذّت بیش‌تری ازش می‌بردم.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

great read from my youth

fast-paced, fun, what we would today call YA SF. can't remember how long ago i read this (at least 3 decades, prob 4), but recognized passages & turns of phrase. odd how several things stated as fact (with 1965 paleontology), have now been shown to be likely completely wrong (i.e., feathers - i'll let you look it up)

[Dan Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first SF book I ever read (4th grade, I believe). I still have very fond memories of it.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for kids who love dinosaurs and time travel...

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read many times as a kid. Rating based on that perspective.

[Gilbert Stack · Rating 5 out of 5]

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, whose 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 17 year old 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.

[Duranduran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel so bad writing a negative review on this book, as seeing many have wrote this book as positive. Unfortunately, I could not. This book was not terrible, I did get through it, though with a grin all the way through. The plot was simple, and there were many aspects that I could not bear to look over. The book made some aspects more complicated than need to be and parts where it required more elobaration and to be discussed complexly it glossed over. There were parts where I wish the author added more explanation such as how the tunnel actually works and parts that could have been simplified dragged on. Character development was very brief and when certain questions I feel the reader may have asked was once again glossed over. Example is when discussing allocation of funds and the borrowing/stealing of materials for the time machine the author just points out that the company will be ok with it. Why would you even bring up a stealing of materials point if you're just going to gloss over it with some lame response as the company will be ok with it.
The story takes place during the cold war and the first chapter is all about that. Yet, they never mention or bring it up again. The author could have utilized the cold war points so much more in this story.
As I stated, it wasn't a bad unreadable book, just a lot of darts being thrown with nothing sticking. Only a few chapters included multiple time periods with most was from 80 mya, yet those chapters once again passed too quickly and with not much detail or atmosphere. I'm sorry for this harsh review, but I would not recommend this as a good or decent time travel story. There are so much more out there written during the same time that did a better job.

[Allen McDonnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine juvenile story

I remember getting in big trouble because of this book when I was seven years ld. My parents caught me reading it by using the nightlight in my bedroom :) This story shows just how much our ideas about Dinosaurs have changed in the last five decades. Herein they are depicted as either slow lumbering herbivores or bipedal upright carnivores, both of which drag their tails for balance. Modern anatomy specialists now believe both sorts kept their tails elevated just like a cat or dog does, and we now believe T Rex and Allosaurus walked with head and tail level balanced on their two hind legs at center mass. It was a lot of fun to go back and reread a novel I loved 45 years ago and see how vastly different what we thought we knew then has changed to what we think we know now. Perhaps in another five decades our current views will seem just as silly to those reading about them in 2069!

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled to rate this book reading it again as an adult, but decided to be generous - I must have liked it a LOT as a kid since I saved it all these years. I don’t mind glossing over the lack of actual science behind the technology (it is SciFy after all), and I can better appreciate the research grant process described quite well. The adventure itself is good.

[Myth Liberated · Rating 4 out of 5]

یه کتاب ساده با داستان پیش پا افتاده کاملا مناسب برای تخیل کودکان

[Paul Darcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

by Lester Del Rey, published in 1966.

Time travel, the ultimate science fiction convention . . . Well, I think it is one of them at least. And this short novel by Lester Del Rey is one such tale.

And, I’m embarrassed to say, this is my first ever Lester Del Rey (written) story I’ve read. If you are in to science fiction then you will immediately recognize Del Rey as a publisher.

So how was this short novel? Well it’s a young boy’s adventure tale, but don’t expect anything quite so good as Heinlein.

The protagonist’s father is a physicist, of course, and he has invented a time machine. The father’s good friend is a paleontologist, of course, so you see the setup right off. And the situation does the job of getting them all to the past when the dinosaurs roamed the land.

Yes, Tyrannosaurus Rex is there, of course. And I find it interesting that almost everything they encounter gets filled with lead from the rifles they took along or the .45s. But hey, it’s a boy’s adventure tale and so you need to have gunplay, don’t you?

As usual I’m not going to give away too much but I will say they need to step up through time due to an accident and therefore encounter several times from 80 million years in the past up to 10,000 years ago.

Overall an entertaining tale, but nothing to go rushing out to find (if you still can). Despite the trigger happy travelers, this novel was fun enough to keep you turning the pages.

I would give it a 3 out of 5 just because it is Del Rey, and because the time travel is pretty neat, if by now standard fair.

[Jim Razinha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had this as a kid and for a Year of Nostalgic Rereads, it was a no-brainier...once I stumbled across it again earlier this year. I had another copy of the same 1971 Scholastic edition from my childhood that I found at a Half Price Books but that's gone now. I'm pretty sure that this was the first book I read that involved time travel - I was 10 and don't recall another earlier written exposure. I was enamoured, though even my 10 year old eyes saw that Lester del Rey mixed up his timelines (I had another Scholastic book on dinosaurs and knew that Archaeopteryx did not live in the same period as T. Rex). But it was still cool.

Unexpected, as an adult reader, was this nugget of wisdom (emphasis mine):

“It’s what we see or think we see that’s crazy. Not truth. Not reality.”
“Uh-huh. Do you suppose we’ll ever really know?”
“I doubt it. Man keeps discovering truths — truth here — truth there. But always a truth. Never the truth. Do you get what I mean?”

A welcome depth in a children's book...

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cute story about time travel that takes people back to the age of the dinosaur, and then the difficult journey back to the present day in hazardous leaps forward in time.
Really easy read, and was entertaining, but a bit confusing at the end. I feel like the author was trying to make some kind of philosophical point, but it really didn't fit with the general feeling of the story - which was mostly flat.

[Kevin Kraft · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book did much to fertilize my already-vivid imagination when I was a child. I was both surprised and not surprised that others have been similarly affected. One would likely ask why this book has never been made into a film. But, in truth, it has been a number of times over, as it is one of the pioneers of time-travel books and deserves a special place in literary annals.

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was a book I'd read in my youf, but it turns out it wasn't. It's a book Jo read in her youf. It's a time-travel YA novel. A couple teenage boys go back in time and have to find their way back. It's better than I expected, but it's showing its age a bit.

[Unni Krishnan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a nice little friendly tale of history. History that stretches to 80 million years. A pleasant read and I liked it. Nothing spectacular, not much of character development. It reminded me of Journey to the center of earth, the pattern is similar.

[Victor Yu · Rating 5 out of 5]

good book , but cheap paper, it rips too easily and i don't like that. its like mad old paper man

[Zahra Dashti · Rating 4 out of 5]

اون موقع که خوندمش دوسش داشتم :)

[Steve Rainwater · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lester del Rey YA book.

I re-read this recently because I remembered finding it in my elementary school library in maybe 5th grade. At the time it seemed pretty cool and led to me visiting my city's public library in search of bigger and better science fiction books. At the public library I discovered Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, and other authors who I read through my high school years.

Rereading now, the story feel a little clunky and reads more like a Nancy Drew or Tom Swift story than a real novel. It's even primitive compared to Asimov and Heinlein's young adult efforts which are generally still enjoyable for adults. Still, like the Tom Swift series, it was an early literary influence and I'm glad I found it.

The plot concerns two teenage boys who have to make a trip through time to find and save one of the boy's fathers, who was lost while testing an experimental time machine. They visit various time periods and encounter dinosaurs, mammoths, early humanoids.

[James Cain · Rating 1 out of 5]

Less than good.
I like Lester Del Rey, but this just doesn't hold up.
Time Travel fiction has gotten much more sophisticated in it's questions and implications.
This is basically a couple of scientists going back to the dinosaurs and blasting the hell out of everything with .45's. It's about as silly as it sounds. Sorry Lester.

[David Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

With one scientist father widowed and the other divorced, there are no mothers to ask if they're out of their minds sending their sons back to the age of the dinosaurs on a rescue mission. A mother would have stopped the plot in its tracks. This has all the '60s YA fun promised by a title as fantastic as "Tunnel Through Time." And that cover!

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, the memories of that Scholastic book order box coming into the classroom, I guess in with this, and probably a copy of Dynamite magazine...

[Cheryl]

Sigh.
August 2021.
Fortunately there's a lot better written nowadays. I like del Rey, but this is just silly.