Lester Smith

The Pastime Machine Lester Smith

After inventing a trans-dimensional vessel, a Traveler embarks on an epic journey to Hell and back, then sets his sights upon attaining Heaven. Along the way he stumbles through a number of other mythologies and is changed beyond his imagining-while inadvertently opening a route for corporate expansion. But in the end everything works out according to plan.

Except the Traveler never had a plan.

The Pastime Machine is a Byronic mashup of Dante's Inferno and Wells' The Time Machine, with bits of the Odyssey, The Poetic Edda, Egyptian funerary text, and of course the Bible, plus a nod toward "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It's NSFW from page one, lampoons everybody including its author, and then kills them off ignominiously in text. It's got a nude giant. And it's written entirely in sonnets.