Taking on the task of writing a sequel to H.G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine must have been like painting a target on his back. Having read Baxter’s Xeelee Omnibus I was very curious if Baxter can pull it off as the Xeelee books are very hard sci-fi with some very complicated scientific expositions (half of which went well over my head). His prose style in those books is readable but not so high on literary merit. In contrast The Time Machine is a beautifully written and fairly straight forward sci-fi adventure. Baxter’s The Time Ships does seem to be quite popular among his books so I was intrigued to find out how he managed to make a success of it.The Time Ships continues directly from the end of The Time Machine where the unnamed protagonist has recently returned to 1891 from his adventures in the far future where he battled Morlocks, witnessed the end of the world, almost get eaten by weird giant crabtrocities etc. After a few days home it occurs to him to go back to the future to rescue Weena, the little Eloi girl who befriended him and was carried off by Morlocks for her troubles. This is the initial premise to the start of a truly epic adventure in time and space in both past and future directions this time.One missed opportunity about Wells’ The Time Machine is that the “timey wimey” paradox is not featured in the book, the story feels kind of linear in spite of the journey to the future and the return journey at the end. The science fiction genre, which Wells has helped to give birth to, has developed very far since Wells’ time, and Baxter has taken full advantage of that subsequent development. It is as if Baxter has turbo charged the original book, or - perhaps more accurately - strapped a FTL drive to it. From the Edwardian settings Baxter goes on to incorporate post-humanism, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, parallel universes, space elevators and many other modern sci-fi concepts. The Time Ships does not read like a sequel that Wells may have written it himself. It reads more like fan fiction written by a scientist and eminent sci-fi author. Fortunately this time Baxter’s science (mostly) did not go over my head, I certainly find The Time Ships more accessible than his Xeelee books. The plot is completely unpredictable and the occasional illustrations are wonderful, there is even a great anti-war message. Baxter also makes the time machine itself more believable: “Well, then, this is the essence of my Time Machine,’ I concluded. ‘The machine twists Space and Time around itself, thus mutating Time into a Spatial Dimension – and then one may proceed, into past or future, as easy as riding a bicycle!”“We cannot help but interact with History, you and I. With every breath we take, every tree you cut down, every animal we kill, we create a new world in the Multiplicity of Worlds. That is all. It is unavoidable.”Nicely put! Stephen Baxter’s faux-Wellsian prose is a valiant effort though he does not really have Wells’ finesse with the language. He certain overuses exclamation marks in his narratives and dialogue, a habit which I find quite jarring. He did quite well with the character development though, at least with the two central character, the Time Traveler and his Morlock friend Nebogipfel (no, I won’t elaborate on the “Morlock friend” part). The Time Traveller seems to be more badass and pugnacious than I remember from the Wells book. Baxter has the advantage of modern science knowledge which he applied cleverly to the story. In spite of some stylistic flaws I would rate this book at 5 stars because I had 5 stars worth of entertainment out of it. By far the best Stephen Baxter book I ever read and it has made me a regular customer of his.
Stephen Baxter's Time Ships is a sequel to HG Wells' classic The Time Machine. Where Wells was crisp, haunting and poignant, Baxter is deep and broad and offers his usual blend of hard core scifi philosophy and science.Time Ships picks up where The Time Machine left off. The Time Traveler (TTT), after getting nothing more than a tepid response to his story of his first trip to the future, rushed headlong back into the future to find and rescue his Eloi friend Weena. Instead of returning to fix the wrongs of his previous time travel experiences, TTT finds himself in a different future, somehow caused by his initial trip. In this new trip, Earth is not the same as expected, and an evolutionarily different kind of Morlock has emerged from a subterra-bound existence to live on the dark side of a gigantic shell around the sun. On this new world, TTT meets his Morlock guide, Nebogipfel.While Nebogipfel initially pushes the boundaries of what TTT has come to understand about Morlocks, he ulitmately pushes TTT in his overall understandings of science, the human condition, evolution and time travel.Nebogipfel identifies a "multiplicity of histories", essentially identifying that there exist multiple disconnected but somewhat parallel threads of history. TTT traveled along one thread in his first trip, and leaped to a different thread his second time. Each of TTT's and Nebogipfel's subsequent trips explores a different thread of history. These trips include a journey to TTT's younger self in London which opens a vast exploration of causality and inherent contradictions and supposed impossibilities introduced by time travel.Their journeys include a jaunt into WWI-era London, in which we find the war effort spending significant resources to develop Time Travel into a serious competitive advantage of the Germans. From there we jump to a version of the Paleocene era, which ultimately becomes inhabited by a small group of a-bomb survivors who launch humanity down a new evolutionary path. Ultimately, we travel to the origins of the Universe...Baxter's writings are filled with time travel and it's related philosophies and science. Evolutionary themes are of also great importance in his stories. I'm a big fan of these themes, and while discussions of time travel take up a lot of space in Time Ships, Baxter only scratches the surface of of his opportunity to address evolution impacted by a multiplicity of histories.Through the first third of the book, I was thinking that Time Ships was a 4-star rating. But most of the final third of the book was dragged down by the weight of time travel theory interplay between TTT and Nebogipfel until the final chapter when TTT was led back on his originial track to find Weena. Baxter nails H.G. Well's tone for the TTT and I can't help but enjoy Baxter's thoroughly explored what-happened-next to Well's characters and themes.The book, overall, is enjoyable. But readers should be prepared to explore the depths of time travel theory while exploring the what-ifs of Well's original classic.
What do You think about The Time Ships (1995)?
This book marked my introduction to Stephen Baxter, and it is a wonderfully fun read too. True to the source upon which it is based, The Time Ships goes way, way, wayyyyyyyy out beyond expectations in extrapolating what if's in the life of The Time Traveller. Baxter adds some fascinating new characters and events to the character's adventure through time. The alternate history WWII was especially fascinating. The team lost in the Jurassic period, founders of a galactic civilization, was truly awe-inspiring too. My main complaint is Baxter's extrapolation of the evolution of the Morlocks which was utterly fascinating but also quite ludicrous. A Dyson Sphere? Built by Morlocks? I love the idea so much but that dinged the armor of my suspension of disbelief. I'm sure Baxter understood that Eloi and Morlock were a silly evolution of post-Victorian industrial class division in English society, which even Wells himself badly failed to think through properly. The industrial revolution alone should have hinted at the dramatic changes taking place in the world, that nothing present would remain consistent for centuries ahead, let alone hundreds of millenia. Alas, it is a novella and social satire, not a full novel, so it's acceptable on those grounds that Wells knew of the limitation and wanted to illustrate the absurdity of class division. Unfortunately, that's not the case, as Wells was later known for his radical views on racial equality and selective breeding, which reached a peak in Nazi Germany of the era. But, one is allowed one's opinion, even when grossly, inescapably, inexcusably wrong. I was thrilled with the ending. Overall, this book was Baxter at his peak, and was not matched by any of his works since. Which brings me to my next point: the more recent works of Baxter from 2000 onward. Very much like Heinlein, Baxter made dramatic shifts in perspectives during his writing career, and not for the better. I have read about half of his recent works and could not stomach them--because I don't do well reading insanity. Let's just be honest, all evidence in his writing points to a Heinlein who had lost his marbles late in life. I feel the same of Baxter due to his works which are utter rubbish. Just my opinion, not looking to incite the angst of loyal fans. But I was one, back when Baxter wrote science fiction. He stopped doing that around 2003 or so with the release of Evolution, The Light of Other Days, and his rambling, nonsensical Manifold trilogy--or, one might call it a unology since it is one book rewritten twice over. Talk about selling the London Bridge. Have you also heard of the Spanish Prisoners for sale? Like Heinlein's early works, I'll stick with the younger Baxter before he lost his marbles. Some very enjoyable works there, such as Raft and Flux and Ring. Maybe some day Baxter will return from the alternate universe his brain has been residing in, and begin writing science fiction again. Until then, I'll pass on his experiments in Freudian limits.
—Jonathan Harbour
Stephen Baxter is one of those science fiction writers with the background (mathematics) to back it up. He writes what some might call "hard" science fiction, putting a lot more emphasis on the science than on the fiction.And that's OK. I only state that to give you a heads up for what to expect. The Time Ships is presented as a sequel to The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, using all of the same characters and storyline as in the original. That's probably what first intrigued me about the book. He starts the story right after the main character has returned to 1897 from the age of the Morlocks and Eloi, and is intent on going back to rescue his love of the far future, Weena. What he discovers is the principle that instead of changing history, every action we take has the effect of creating alternate realities. He travels to a distant future that is vastly different than the one he left.One caveat: because he deals with the far future and very distant past--including going back all the way to the beginning--there are a lot of references to evolution in the story. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, Baxter is a scientist who writes hard science fiction. His treatment of God and belief is what one would expect from someone who puts science ahead of religion.The story doesn't have a lot of conflict--internal or external--and with the exception of the main character, not a lot of character development. Instead, probably similar to the original, it is caught up in the wonder of describing the many worlds that he discovers. There is much reference--as was in the original--to man's inability to escape from his own violent tendencies, and war seems the inevitable result in many of the histories he explores. The book is thick--520 pages--and he takes advantage of that length to be thorough in not only a multitude of possible histories, but their implications on the nature of mankind.It wasn't the most entertaining book I have read recently, but I found it fascinating nevertheless.
—Glen Robinson
Time travel has always been my favorite genre of science fiction, yet it is probably one of the hardest to get right. Aside from the science of time travel, there's the eternal paradoxes that time travel poses - such as how one can travel to the past, effect change (after all, where's the fun in traveling through time if you can't muck about with it?), and not create an impossible conundrum in the process. Wells's classic The Time Machine neatly stepped around the whole problem by having his unnamed Traveler voyage into the future rather than the past. By contrast, Stephen Baxter tackles these issues head-on in this follow-up to Wells's story, a worthy sequel to a landmark work of science fiction.Picking up neatly where Wells left off, Baxter's tale ranges far into the future and back to the beginning of Time itself, encountering realities profoundly affected by the invention of time travel. Accompanying the Traveler is Nebogipfel, a Morlock unlike any invented by Wells. Nebogipfel is a sensitive character who supplies the modern scientific explanations to what the 19th century narrator encounters, and the friendship that emerges between the two of them is one of the highlights of this book,Nebogipfel also serves to answer many of the traditional paradoxes of time travel that appear in the course of their travels in time. Though many will find the explanations unsatisfactory, Baxter should be commended for confronting them head-on and creating a much richer novel in the process. Fans of the original novel will also respect his homage to Wells and the respect that Baxter pays to many of the Wells's ideas, though in the end this is a must-read for any fan of brilliantly imagined, well-written science fiction.
—Mark
