Yep. When I google “knuckletop” and “science fiction” I get “Summer of Love”
Well I’ll be! Thanks! Now I’ll have to look up a copy.
How about the time machine from the movie Detention (2011)? It’s built into a bear. Not a teddy bear…a full-size taxidermied bear that serves as a school mascot.
Does the cave in Dark count as a time machine?
The restaurant from the book Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grill. I liked that people would wander in after it arrived and just assume they hadn’t noticed it before.
It did have the drawback of being powered by a nuclear explosion. It had to be juuust the right distance from the bomb. Also, if a bomb dropped nearby when you weren’t in the restaurant you got left behind.
I gave that some thought myself when I watched it, and I would classify it more as a wormhole. Or, more specifically, as three wormholes which appear to intersect.
I remember a story from Asimov’s where the main character was a “Time Detective” whose machine was disguised as, of all things, a trash can.
Three stories about that character (whose name was Ben Hardy) appeared in Asimov’s, all by Warren Salomon Summary Bibliography: Warren Salomon
Time & Punishment
Time on My Hands
As Time Goes By
Somewhere in Time falls into the “State of Mind” category. Hypnosis assisted by artifacts from the desired time to create atmosphere. Also to help you get by once you arrive.
See also Heinlein’s “Elsewhen”, though IIRC that has specially-made phonograph records to help with the hypnosis.
Fascinating that the same guy could write such a terrible time-travel story and such wonderful ones as “By His Own Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies”.
“Elsewhen” isn’t really a time-travel story, though. The people end up in alternate universes with no temporal connection to each other (and which, given how well they fit the individuals who go to them, might as well have been created by the thoughts of those people, rather than being pre-existing).
You’d like Rainbow Mars, if you haven’t read it already. I didn’t think it was one of his best, but I didn’t hate it like the first few reviewers did on that Amazon link.
I have used the metaphor of the Secretary-General from the Universe, when talking with people about how best to lobby during the Trump Administration…
EDIT: For the OP, I liked the space dreadnought wrapped around a quantum black hole from Charles Stross’s, Singularity Sky. Just have to make sure you don’t violate causality within the Eschaton’s historic light cone…
One thing that always bugged me: a polaroid was taken including Randall, Fidgit, Strutter, Og, Wally and Vermin holding up the map of the time holes. As far as I can tell, the picture was not destroyed, so Kevin would have had a copy of the map. Apparently a Time Bandits sequel was planned, perhaps based on that picture, but indefinitely shelved due to deaths of some actors.
All the talk of the Tardis and its malfunctioning chameleon circuit reminded me of another one, the Magic Schoolbus.
(because of course Ms. Frizzle is a Time Lady; doesn’t everyone know that?)
She’s clearly River Song, in fact.
I’d like to mention Terry Pratchett’s “Johnny And The Bomb” where the time “machine” was an apparenty homeless old ladies shopping cart full of mysterious trash bags - “Bags o’ Time” as she called them.