The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter

The Time Ships Reviews

• 
  Bionic Jean

  In 1995, a hundred years after H.G. Wells's novel "The Time Machine", the Wells' estate authorised an official sequel by Stephen Baxter. The Time Ships went on to win several prestigious SF awards, including the British Science Fiction award for that year. It is an ambitious project and an exciting read in its own right.
  
  The novel starts where the original left off, in 1891, with "the Time Traveller" preparing to return to the year 802,701 to save Weena, the young female Eloi who died in the fire with the Morlocks, a fact for which he had felt guilty and responsible ever since.
  
  We learn that the time machine had been constructed from quartz, and fuelled by a radioactive substance called "Plattnerite", which had been given to the traveller by an unknown and mysterious benefactor, twenty years earlier. Incidentally, Stephen Baxter has coined this word using the name of a character in one of Wells's short stories entitled "The Plattner Story". Published in a collection in 1897, the story is about a school teacher, "Gottfried Plattner" who chemically analyses a green powder of uncertain origin which had been given him by his students. When lit, the powder violently launches him into a mysterious parallel dimension, where he is observed by mute "Watchers of the Living". There are further references to these beings later in this novel.
  
  With the aid of the Plattnerite, the Time Traveller sets off into the future and stops in 657,208 , when the daytime sky has gone permanently dark. At this point there is an unexpected twist in the tale, as the traveller is horrifed to find himself seized and abducted by a gang of Morlocks. However, these Morlocks turn out to be far more more culturally advanced than the ones he met before. The traveller feels the same repugnance for the Morlocks that he did before, but gradually comes to realise that it is the Morlocks who have inherited the world's knowledge and civilisation, and not the Eloi.
  
  Stephen Baxter introduces the second main character at this point - the Morlock Nebogipfel. Here he has appropriated a name which H. G. Wells used in an earlier short story - also about a time machine - called "The Chronic Argonauts". The Time Traveller assumes that Nebogipfel is a vastly important being in this society. He is sadly disillusioned to find that, on the contrary, Nebogipfel is a teacher, and not considered very knowledgable at all. Because the Morlock has an unusual interest in ancient times and cultures, he was given the task of caring for the Time Traveller. After hearing the Time Traveller's own story Nebogipfel explains that the conflict between Eloi and Morlocks never occurred, because of "the Writer" (ie. H. G. Wells)'s publication of the story which became "The Time Machine". A neat little joke there on the current author's part! But it therefore followed that Weena would be impossible to locate, because the timeline he sought to go to was now inaccessible.
  
  There are a lot of definitions and explanations relating to quantum physics, which the reader assumes to be either theoretical or even pseudoscience. It is tempting to wonder whether H. G. Wells himself would have written this sort of hard SF, had he had access to the scientific advancements of the next hunded years. It is certainly consistent with the style of his SF novels and stories. Another example of this is the "Dyson sphere" which from Nebogipfel's description, the Morlocks in the present timeline have evidently constructed around the inner solar system. They use the sun's energy to power it. (A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical colossal spherical structure, constructed around a star, completely surrounding it, thereby capturing most or all of its power output.) The Time Traveller is told that descendants of the humans he expected to see do exist, but they live on the sunlit inner surface of the Sphere, while the Morlocks live on the outer shell.
  
  Eventually the Time Traveller manages to capitalise on Nebogipfel's interest and desire to learn about him, and tricks the Morlock into taking him back to his Time machine, ostensibly so that he can show Nebogipfel how it works. The reader is identifying with the Time Traveller by this point, so has a good idea of what will happen next. Sure enough, as soon as he can, the Time Traveller reactivates his machine and travels to 1873 to persuade his younger self to stop his research on Plattnerite. He had tried to escape alone, but as soon as Nebogipfel realised what he was doing, and much to the Time Traveller's disgust incidentally, he grabbed hold of him to follow him there.
  
  There follows the sort of scene much beloved by all SF readers, an apparent impossibility due to diverging timelines, where the Time Traveller meets his younger self. The author and the viewpoint character call this younger self "Moses", which is the original Time Traveller's name in H. G. Wells's book. The Time Traveller attempts to persuade his younger self to stop his research by using Nebogipfel's appearance as proof that reality is changed by time travel. This part of the book is full of wit and gentle humour. It is very much in keeping with Wells's writing style, and the stiffness and pomposity of Edwardian characters is well conveyed, amusing both the viewpoint character, reverting backwards from his point in time, and the readers, from ours.
  
  The Time Traveller is stupefied to see an enormous tank pull into Moses's yard, and equally so when the commanding officer on board is not a man but a young woman, Hilary Bond. She is accompanied by the Time Traveller's friend Filby, now much older. They all seem to know more about what is happening than either the Time traveller or Moses, and take both of them, plus Nebogipfel, forward to their 1938, where World War I is still continuing.
  
  Much subdued, the Time Traveller is told that this is partly due to the discovery of time travel, which had been influenced by his work. Britain's major cities are all encased in domes, and they are still at war with Germany. Baxter's inclusion of domes here is reminiscent of the post world war "Bombproofs" mentioned as existing in London after the second world war in H. G. Wells' novel "The Shape of Things to Come." As well as referencing Wells, Baxter also introduces an actual person from history here, an Austrian expatriate Kurt Gödel, who was considered to be one of the most significant logicians in history. In real life, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century. In this novel, the British government hoped to win the war by making use of Gödel's experiments, to alter Germany's history.
  
  Nebogipfel realises and explains to both the Time Traveller and the reader that this is yet another future, resulting from their actions when they met Moses. During a bombing raid on London by the Germans, Gödel shows the travellers that not only does he have a vial of Plattnerite, but also the prototype of a Time-Car. The Time Traveller and Nebogipfel manage to escape, but Moses is killed in an explosion when he tries to save Gödel.
  
  In this section of the book, Gödel comes across almost as a mouthpiece for H. G. Wells, as Baxter makes him a prescient character describing what society would be like after the war. This is a very bleak and pessimistic view, which seems to be similar to Wells's own. With no clear plan, the Time Traveller and Nebogipfel are thrust back to the Paleocene, where the time machine is wrecked on a tree. They barely survive, and adapt to their new lives in the Paleocene, which seems now to be permanent. At one point, the Time Traveller nearly dies because of a bacterial infection, as his body is not adapted to the environment. This reminds the reader very much of the ending of H. G. Wells's novel, "The War of the Worlds" when it is the Martians who succumb.
  
  Eventually a scouting party from the "Chronic Expeditionary Force" in 1944 discovers them. It is commanded by Hilary Bond, who had investigated human archaeological remains in her time, and deduced from their discrepancy in the fossil record, where the Time Traveller and Nebogipfel would be likely to have arrived. Ironically, it transpires that a German Messerschmitt plane has followed them, and it drops a "Carolinum" bomb, on the site, leaving virtually nothing but devastation.
  
  This is another example of Baxter's theorising and literary references. In our world the bomb would be an atomic bomb, with its nuclear energy produced by uranium. In this novel the science is slightly different. The suggestion is that the universe of the Time Traveller is not ours, but a slightly different one, consistent with H. G. Wells's novels. In Wells's world, nuclear energy is produced from a material called carolinum, which allows Plattnerite to be produced relatively easily. These Carolinum bombs, contrary to A-bombs, continue to detonate for years with an eerie purple glow. The name "carolinum", and the reference to continuous detonation are both based on Wells's novel, which he called "The World Set Free". Prophetically, he wrote it in 1913, and in it H. G. Wells predicted nuclear weapons of a more destructive and uncontrollable sort than the world has yet seen.
  
  Nebogipfel and the Time Traveller return to the devastated campsite, and over the next year and a half, a handful of maimed surviving soldiers including Hilary Bond start a colony which they call "First London." Nebogipfel insists on repairing the Time-Car although the Time Traveller is irritated by what he sees as a useless waste of time. As one would expect in a good SF story however, shavings of Plattnerite were somehow acquired to power it on a journey through time. The Time Traveller and Nebogipfel travel through fifty million years, seeing "First London" expand and develop colonies on the moon and in Earth's orbit. They also witness extensive human destruction of the Earth's environment, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
  
  Eventually they run out of Plattnerite fuel, and wake up to find they are being looked after by a "Universal Constructor", which Nabogipfel has worked out must be a colony of life forms based on nanotechnology. Few stars are left in the night sky, because Dyson Spheres have been constructed around many host stars to provide colonies. None of the beings who have descended from humans are at all recognisable as life forms to either Nabofgipfel or the Time Traveller, being far distant in time from either. The Universal Constructor's goal is to harvest the energy of the sun, using the Plattnerite to build time-travel vehicles to travel to the beginning of the universe. Nebogipfel, who has been partly enhanced with nanotechnology, works out that this goal will take a million years, a time period which does not seem to signify to either him or the Universal Constructor.
  
  The Time Traveller however, sees that it is not necessary to wait for a million years. They acquire enough Plattnerite from the Constructors to travel forward a million years in their time machine, to when the Constructors will have finished building their time ships. Once there, reality seems to change, and there is clearly a grand plan with different beings or a consciousness which replaces the Universal Constructor. Although it is unseeable and virtually unknowable, Nebogipfel and the Time Traveller deduce that the new consciousness seems to have more understanding than the Universal Constructor whom it replaces. As a consequence, the Time Traveller and Nebogipfel are relocated to 1871, in the Time Traveller's original history. Gratifyingly, as the reader suspects, the Time Traveller himself had been the mysterious stranger with the Plattnerite sample. Under the alias "Gottfried Plattner", he had given the sample to his younger self. Because of this, the timelines are consistent, and the history which ends up creating the Constructors and their successors proceeds. Nebogipfel, always eager for knowledge and new experiences, leaves the Time Traveller behind to travel with the successors of the Constructors.
  
  But the story would not satisfy unless it concluded with an attempt to save Weena. The Time Traveller makes one final journey forward to a slightly earlier point in 802,701, and in a very exciting episode just manages to save Weena from the death she suffered before. But since the timeline must not be changed again, the Time Traveller has to destroy the machine. He stays with the Eloi, encouraging them to learn how to farm and to gradually reduce their dependence on the Morlocks for food and clothing, so that they will one day be separate.
  
  The Time Traveller writes an account of his adventures sealing it within some Plattnerite, in the hope that it would be found at some point in the future. He finally records that he plans to go into the world of the Morlocks again, so that he could add an appendix to the story. The last sentence of the novel says that no appendix was found.
  
  Stephen Baxter has written a hugely ambitious sequel, which succeeds on just about every level. It captures the voice and style of H.G. Wells, as well as being an absorbing and exciting read on its own. The characters are engaging throughout, and the development of the Morlocks provide a very neat twist on the original. References to Wells's other works, mean that the novel is even more enjoyable.
• 
  Apatt

  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.
• 
  Xabi1990

  Pág. 224, 40% y abandonado.
  Por Dios y por la Virgen, qué aburrimiento.
  
  Dicen que es steampunk, género por el que siento aprecio. Que lo digan, pero de momento solo parcialmente época victoriana y el vapor, poco o nada.
  
  El autor es matemático e ingeniero, y parece ser que eso le ha llevado a más explicaciones de las que me gustan. Se enzarza con las paradojas temporales que sí posibles o no y lo soluciona con el tema de universos múltiples/paralelos. Pues vale.
  
  El autor es inglés. El pobre no tiene la culpa, pero no me matan los autores ingleses. Pocos triunfan conmigo. Y es que se enrolla con las localizaciones de Londón y me sobran.
  
  El libros es una continuación autorizada de La máquina del tiempo de Wells. Pues bien, como presentación no está mal, pero el desarrollo aburre.
  
  Y he aguantado esas 200 págs. Y ya. Y mira que quería que me gustara por todo lo anterior (salvo la pertenencia a Albión) y porque siempre que empiezo CF recuerdo el “sense of wonder” que me asaltaba en mis lejanos comienzos con la CF y me gustaría que volviera, pero es difícil (leed Projecto Hail Mary de Weir, que ese sí lo consigue)
  
  Pues eso, que lo aprecies si podéis (otros del autor tampoco han triunfado conmigo, por cierto)
• 
  Raed

  I love The Time Machine. It’s the grandfather of time travel stories, and still one of the best. H.G. Wells’ classic story tells of a nameless Time Traveller who takes a quick jaunt to the future to prove a scientific point, and then returns home to tell the tale
  
  The Time Ships is a book crammed with ideas, essential for the hard sf reader, complete enough as a novel to satisfy those beyond the subgenre. Towards the end it falters a little, it stops being the story of the people and becomes the story of the ideas - a big, wild tumble of speculative physics
  
  Behind the 10 miles of physics and philosophy this book is a love story:
  
  I was a murderer of the future: I had taken on, I realized, more powers than God himself. By my twisting-up of the workings of History, I had wiped over billions of unborn lives—lives that would now never come to be. And I realized now that I could never retrieve Weena.
  
  The Time Traveller reached the end and the beginning of Multiplicity, not for the big picture of his species or his life or his power, just to save Weena : a creature that gave him Unconditional Platonic love...
  
  
• 
  bsc

  Baxter did a great job capturing the feel and style of The Time Machine. What he didn't capture of H.G.'s brevity. There are some truly fascinating ideas in this book. The problem is that there's too many ideas. The result of this was a longing for the book's satisfying but predictable conclusion.
• 
  fromcouchtomoon

  Cool because it's a sequel to The Time Machine; dull because it's written like a sequel to The Time Machine. A slow start that grows from intriguing to dull and back again, but Baxter's Hard SF misses the boat, er, ship, rather, when he mostly neglects Wells' primary social concerns for engineering sensawunda. Also, Morlocks probably don't call themselves Morlocks.
• 
  Brian Clegg

  There has been a long tradition of writing sequels or variants of H. G. Wells classics - think, for example, of Christopher Priest's mashup of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds in The Space Machine. This 1995 novel from Stephen Baxter is, in one sense, a straight sequel to The Time Machine, picking up immediately after the time traveller returns to the 'present' of 1891. If I'm honest, The Time Machine is my least favourite of Wells' SF novels. Although the early chat about time as a fourth dimension was distinctly visionary, I find the actual adventure in the distant future heavy going. There are still elements of that in this sequel - but there's no doubt that Stephen Baxter managed to go way beyond Wells' original vision.
  
  Firstly, Baxter invokes the Many Worlds hypothesis, to enable time travel without paradoxes, which intriguingly means that every journey through time potentially produces a totally different future. Then he brings in other concepts from Wells' writing, notably his books covering modern warfare and presaging a sort of atomic bomb (though, as described in Wells' The World Set Free, very different from the real thing). Time travel is envisaged of a way of fighting a war... and then totally transforms the history of humanity and its successors.
  
  Towards the end it all goes a little over the top. Early in his career, Baxter was involved with Arthur C. Clarke and we get some parallels with the star child sequence in 2001, combined with echoes of the ending of James Blish's Cities in Flight books. When we arrive at such lofty, heavyweight concepts it can be easy to lose any sense of engaging storytelling, especially combined with the cod Victorian writing style. There's a quote from New Scientist on the back of my copy that says that Baxter 'joins [the] exclusive ranks [of those who write] science fiction in which the science is right'. There is certainly a fair dollop of speculative physics here, but we sometimes get it in exchange for great writing. And there is one bit of dodgy history of science, where the time traveller talks knowledgeably about radium some eight years before it was named.
  
  However, despite sometimes getting a little bogged down, there is no doubt this is a novel with both a fantastic span and a whole collection of excellent ideas. Time travel is great in theory as a storyline, but it's rare that time travel fiction really explores it implications. Baxter does this in some depth - and it's impressive stuff.
• 
  Max

  While I felt as if The Time Machine was somewhat too short, this novel was almost certainly too long. Baxter did do a good job of presenting this as a sequel to The Time Machine. However, as a few other reviews note, the Time Traveler does not make for a compelling protagonist. The Dyson Sphere and Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics were interesting elements to include, although I've seen both elsewhere, and handled much better. Some of the histories were interesting, and the alternate World War I would be a brilliant setting for a novel or series of novels. However, the second half of the book is paced rather poorly. The time spent in the Paleocene is largely a recapitulation of "random guy stuck on an island" stories with a Morlock thrown in. Even worse, the time spent on the "White Earth" is just unutterably dull. It is full of far too much exposition and absolutely no depiction of the intriguing post-human future. The subsequent introduction of the titular Time Ships leads to another rather uninteresting stretch. The trip back through time to the dawn of the universe is alright, but all the subsequent action is explained poorly, and not in a good way. I am sometimes okay with sufficiently unexplained or complex endings, if they provoke thought. This, on the other hand, was nonsensical dribble. The Watchers are barely explained and in the end prove to be almost completely superfluous. Thus, I would say it is best to read the first few sections if you wish to read any of this at all, and then set the book aside. Trust me, you will not miss very much.
• 
  Leslie

  This 'sequel' to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine was well done. Baxter starts off very much in Wells' style but while maintaining the fundamentals of the Time Traveler's character, he swiftly brings the story out of Wells' philosophical dystopian mode into the (equally philosophically tinged) modern idea of multiplicity resulting from quantum mechanics.
  
  Some of the various histories were just as horrifying as the original world of the Eloi and Morlocks & some were Utopian though challenging to our ideas of what is important/right.
  
  I particularly liked the fact that in the end, Baxter brings the main character back to Wells' version of the future. A wonderful centennial tribute to Wells!
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  
  https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3248667.html
  
  This is a sequel to The Time Machine, authorised as such by the H.G. Wells estate. (I've had more dealings with the estates of deceased writers in the last week than I can remember from my whole life before the Worldcon.) I have previously mentioned that I always appreciate the breadth and scope of Baxter's vision - the commitment to sensawunda if you like - but that he doesn't always succeed in communicating it in a human way to me. I thought this book ticked the right boxes. The Time Traveller of Wells' novel tries to return to the year 802,701 and save Weena, but gets caught up in the parallel universes of the Many Worlds theory, and visits a number of very well depicted possible futures and pasts along with a friendly Morlock called Nebogipfel. Particularly vivid passages are set in a war-torn London of 1938, where the exiled Kurt Gödel is helping the British government, and a Paleocene setting where they become involved in setting up a wildly premature human colony in the past. Other bits are a little duller, but the overall plot of time paradoxes, which seems in danger of veering out of control at one point, is wrapped up very satisfactorily. Apparently there are lots of references to other H.G. Wells stories as well, which I missed due to not being in that fandom. Overall I enjoyed it.
  
  
• 
  Erik

  Baxter takes the classic HG Wells novela and expands it in new and interesting ways, while still being faithful to the original piece. Here the Time Traveler is more thoughtful and more scientifically minded than he was in "The Time Machine," but the characterization is the same.
  
  
  
  His journey starts where the first book ends and is split up into seven smaller "books" within the more than five-hundred page paperback. Each book takes the the Time Traveller from a child-like understanding of time, to a sad adulthood where time travel causes only bad futures, and back again to a hopeful place of maturity and wonder.
  
  
  
  It is not an easy book to start and delves into a lot of scientific digressions that even ardent science fiction fans might not be used to. In between the theoretical monologues (and eventually, dialogues) is a pensive character piece that questions the nature of reality, infinity and eternity.
  
  
  
  While challenging and a bit hard to read at points, "The Times Ships" is a novel that is exciting, heart breaking and demands to be finished.
• 
  Peter

  Yeah. Well, I finished it but I'm not sure why.
  
  I love the work of H.G. Wells and I was interested in a book beginning at the point where Wells' The Time Machine left off. After all, there have been many such works and most of the have been interesting and a couple of have been downright brilliant.
  
  Baxter got the "voice" of the times just right but, he didn't quite capture Wells. Wells wrote story which had interesting and original thought experiments for the times.
  
  Wells at his wordiest cannot begin to approach the word bloat infecting Baxter's novel. I desperately looked for anything at all, a la Wells, but failed to find any. What I found was an endlessly repetitive pseudo-explanation of time travel couched in 20th C scientific theory. That, and endless descriptive passages. True, Baxter does descr4iption very well; he even does rationalization of the scientifically impossible well enough to make the impossible seem merely improbable.
  
  But, if you are also looking for story, with believable characters, you would do well to look elsewhere.
• 
  GreyAtlas

  I wanted to like this book, truly I did. But I just can't. I really liked the original Time Machine by H.G. Wells, so I thought I would like this one. I read the first 1/4 of this book and then skipped to the ending. It was good until *spoiler* they went back in time to see the narrators former self. The part I loved about the original Time Machine is that the world of the Morlocks and Eloi is believable, at least to me. This book by Baxter crosses from science fiction to fantasy, and had SO MUCH unnecessary shit in it, and I nearly stopped reading it. The ending was okay, but the book had the feel of that movie, Interstellar. The style that Baxter writes in is decent, pretty descriptive. I liked the first part of the book where he became captured by *spoiler* the new Morlocks of the future. But then, shit hits the fan, and the book just fails. It was a good attempt, but overall, just boring and unbelievable.
• 
  prcardi

  Storyline: 2/5
  Characters: 4/5
  Writing Style: 3/5
  World: 3/5
  
  An authorized sequel written on the centennial of what is perhaps the foundational science fiction book - how does one review such a thing? You could ask if it pays proper homage to the original, if it adequately captures the tone of the first, or perhaps if it builds on and betters what was originally there. And I'll address all of those in the process of this review. My overriding concern, however, when I started reading this, was whether or not this needed to be situated in the same world as H.G. Wells's
  The Time Machine. Was this a story that could have just as easily been told without reference to 1891 London, Morlocks or Eloi? Was Baxter using the centennial and reference to the original as an excuse to sell what would otherwise have been an unrelated book? And the answer to those questions is a decided "No." The Time Ships is very much a sequel to The Time Machine but not a sequel that Wells could ever have written. That, in fact, was one of the definitive characteristics of this telling. Baxter wants to show readers how humanity has progressed in the hundred years since the 1895 Time Machine was originally published. And what Baxter can conceive now in contemporary times, was inconceivable in the 19th century.
  
  The book starts off in homage. Wells's prose is obviously and laboriously emulated and the character of the Time Traveler excellently captured. The writing style, however, was there but for the transition, to help us readers make the shift from Wells to Baxter. It doesn't take many chapters for Wells's prose to disappear and for Baxter's to dominate. It made for a lazy homage and does not throw Baxter into a positive light. One of the - if not the - primary marks of the original Time Machine was the prose, and the most that can be said for Baxter's writing is that it demonstrates how even a capable writer pales in comparison to a truly gifted one. The Time Ships is more successful, however, with the narrator. Here, too, this is probably not properly termed "homage" since Baxter is doing far more than venerating Wells. In fact, there is a certain disparaging taking place here - not slighting Wells personally, but slighting the 19th century humanity that could come up with the character of the Time Traveler. For Baxter knows something that appears to have eluded Wells. Wells's Time Traveler was never as noble, as honorable, as open-minded as Wells thought him to be. Wells's Time Traveler was a man of his own time, and Wells only scratched the surface of what that really meant. Baxter, however, can see the 1895 Time Traveler for all his flaws and most importantly, in a way that Wells's never could have: from the viewpoint of the end of the 20th century. What Baxter decides to do with the Time Traveler is the real heart of the book. Baxter is going to make him confront his assumptions and prejudices. The Time Traveler is going to have to truly see what a "man out of time" would have to be. There's other aspects to enjoy as well. Baxter has grand ambitions with technology and physics, incorporating some of the more elaborate and sensational theoretical possibilities into a very readable hard science fiction novel. And he stays true to the theme of the original - what would you discover if you traveled through time and how would you make sense of it? All this is done, as it was in the original, through the actions and perspectives of the Time Traveler.
  
  Somehow, despite having 416 more pages to develop the story, I found that I didn't enjoy the plot of this one anymore than I had the 104-page precursor. That, in part, has to do with the goals of both authors, entertaining plotting not high among them. Both Wells and Baxter want to look at humanity. The irony with Baxter's twist on Wells's Time Traveler is that Baxter is no more freed from his time than was Wells was his. Thus though Baxter has the Time Traveler rethink his patriotism, chauvinism, or prudishness; he has taken on the identity of a 20th century empiricist. Baxter takes the Time Traveler through experience after experience, having him shed his Victorian Gentleman sensibilities, preparing him to be a real "man out of time." What Baxter does, though, is to sterilize humanity; robbing it of culture, values, or the supernatural. This is the future of humanity for Baxter, and it is a paean to science. And as a thought experiment, it is an idea worthy of contemplating. I have doubts, though, that Baxter thought of this as debatable. In his efforts to reveal to us the ethnocentricity and naivete of Wells's original narrator - to show us what a time traveler would have to become - Baxter gives us an ideal that I wouldn't recognize as human. And to his credit, Baxter has the Time Traveler voice these same concerns, but it is always further evidence of the Time Traveler's limited mind, of his inability to overcome his ingrained prejudices. What results, then, is a main character every bit as trapped by a particular (and limited) worldview. To be able to see that in Wells's Time Traveler is evidence of how a book can achieve more than it intended - the Time Traveler being much more complicated (and flawed) than Wells intended. One gets to see the same thing here as well, only this time the Time Traveler reveals to us the assumptions and ideals of a modern day scientist - valuing neutrality and objectivity above all else. By the end of this story I thought that time travel and Baxter's vision of humanity were horrors, and I don't think we were supposed to leave with those impressions. Still, it is a remarkable book, an ambitious one, but not an overly entertaining one. I might have enjoyed the hard science fiction elements more in 1995. Though Baxter does a fairly good job integrating a mind-bending science fiction possibility the many worlds hypothesis, it is not so novel or strange to me anymore, and veteran science fiction readers reading this anew today will probably not find it as fresh and inventive as it was twenty years ago.
• 
  Wayne Fenlon

  Thoroughly enjoyed this authorised sequel to The Time Machine. Stephen Baxter really captured the original feel while also pulling in today's science into the mix. Some of this was way beyond me, but it didn't spoil the time I had. Really glad I read this one. Loved the different take on the Morlocks.
  
  Solid 4 stars.
• 
  Thom

  Narrative exposition is the insertion of important background information within a story. This story (an authorized by the Wells estate sequel to The Time Machine) is nearly all exposition, and much the worse for it. If you haven't read the original, do so - but skip this.
  
  Yes, there is some action in this story, or rather should I say stories. Contained in this long volume are several stories strung together into one narrative. None of the brevity of the original. Herein you may find:
  
  - Enemy Mine, where the Morlock is more civilized than the Human
  - Robinson Crusoe, stranded this time in the Paleocene (with the Morlock as Friday?)
  - The Prisoner, striving to break free from one prison and falling into another
  - a far future run by nanobots (and yet another prison)
  - Back to the Future, where interference changes the future, wait no, is required for the future
  
  All with suitable exposition on Dyson sphere's, survival, and quantum mechanics.
  
  There are three theories of time travel where the past is involved, and Wells never chose which one belonged to his story (set in the far future). Baxter seems to have decided to use all three, which makes life that much more confusing for the reader - nothing a little more exposition can't fix!
  
  When I started writing this review, I was thinking 2 stars - but I seem to have talked myself into a lower rating. Sorry Stephen, this book just wasn't for me, and I can't recommend it.
  
  
• 
  David

  Don't be fooled by the doofy title; this book is a marvellously reimagined "sequel" to HG Wells' classic THE TIME MACHINE. As much as Wells' book was social allegory for the issues of his day, THE TIME SHIPS plumbs some of the questions of 21st century man through the lens of Wells' 19th century hero. I am so impressed with how Baxter uses those Victorian values and perceptions as a lens to grapple with very modern issues...the narrator comes off as remarkably cosmopolitan, open-minded and intelligent despite the limitations of his cultural sphere. The final leg of the book gets a little too "acid trippy" for me (well, the line between "acid trip" and quantum mechanics is always a thin one), and the book is weakest when Baxter tries to showcase his knowledge of abstruse cosmological/astrophysical theory...but despite these flaws, the book is one I couldn't put down, and would recommend to anyone who has read the TIME MACHINE (while you COULD read this book as a standalone, the book vastly rewards a knowledge of Wells' tale).
• 
  Stig Edvartsen

  
  Conflicted about this one. On one hand it really captures the tone and language from the original, but on the other hand it is....umm...kinda dull. I was never invested in what happened to the protagonist. Much in the same way he didn't seem to see the characters around him as people.
  
  
• 
  Boris

  3.5
• 
  Dustin

  
  Sometime in my youth (mid--late 90's,) I recall starting this, but for whatever reason, I never finished it. And now, of course, I no longer own a copy. Thankfully, e-books are much more affordable than physical editions.
• 
  Jonatan FA

  Ca reste mon livre préféré haha
• 
  Paul Wandason

  The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter is pretty poor as a sequel to the original "The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells. This is mostly because the the Time Traveller displayed very different characteristics in each book, and the underlying messages and meanings in the original were not followed through. Indeed, the only ties between the two books were contrived references at the start of the novel and the Time Traveller’s attempt to rescue Weena at the end.
  
  BUT…
  
  As a novel in its own right, this is brilliant! Yes, it is clearly Baxter-esque with his Baxterisms of astro-engineering and Watchers etc.(and ideas nicked from other books), but there is some great science, and of course, elements of time travel.
  
  Whilst multiple and alternate universes are core to this novel, it didn't strike me as an easy get out of jail free card as used in several other time travel novels (e.g. The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma). Actually, the idea was followed through really nicely and was internally logical and consistent with a brilliant ‘application’ at the time-space singularity at the beginning of time.
  The main character is a complete and utter pillock which for made for me some pretty angry reading (I must admit that in the first person I was reading Baxter as the Time Traveller) but at the same time I think it helped to nurture a real fondness for Nebogipfel through whom Baxter expresses his fascinating insights.
  
  Although this novel deserves 0/5 stars as a sequel to the original "The Time Machine", I’m giving The Time Ships a full 5 stars as a time travel novel in its own right.
  
• 
  Jordi Balcells

  Continuación "apócrifa" de La máquina del tiempo, de H.G. Wells, me recuerda a las idas de olla metafísicas de Arthur C. Clarke con su saga Odisea.
  El viajero, con cada nueva visita al pasado o al futuro, cambia su línea espacio-temporal y se desespera porque cree que con ello niega la existencia de todos aquellos atrapados en una realidad que ya no existe. Como buen autor hard, Baxter no se corta un pelo con la física, hasta tal punto que hacia el final del libro parece más bien metafísica, ya que está a años luz (jaja) de nuestro punto de vista y comprensión del cosmos. El penúltimo capítulo es un viaje a los límites de la inteligencia y la existencia humana.
  Debido a la estructuración en sublibros / líneas argumentales, se hace un poco largo y da la impresión de que Baxter tenía suficiente material como para hacer una trilogía sin despeinarse.
  Aparte de esto, es una verdadera joyita. Lectura muy recomendable, pero con paciencia, que esto no es para novatos en la ciencia ficción.
• 
  David Ramirer

  hier ist stephen baxter ein meisterwerk gelungen, indem er den roman "die zeitmaschine" von h.g. wells als steilvorlage in einen direktpass ins gegenüberliegende tor verwandelt hat. spannend und fesselnd von der ersten seite an verbindet baxter gewohnt bizarre zukunftsvisionen mit vielen paradoxas, die die idee des zeitreisens mit sich bringt. am ende wird es sehr abgedreht, obgleich alles logisch im rahmen bleibt und immer noch ein wissenschaftliches fundament hat: ein kunststück, das nur stephen baxter so elegant vorzuführen vermag. ist in meinen augen daher ein standardwerk über zeitreisen, das ich jedem, der dieses thema mag, nur empfehlen kann.
• 
  Fred Hughes

  A thrilling adventure through time form the perspective of H.G. Wells.
  
  Continuing on from the original premise of the time machine Well's sets out again into the future only to find that things have changed from his first venture, Why would history change ?
  
  Soon he is on multiple time journeys eventually travelling back to the beginning of time.
  
  Great read. Highly recommended
• 
  Megan

  The tone of the story and the main character was very similar to the original time machine. I was bored through a lot of the book with the many scientific descriptions and lack of any actual plot. The book was way too long and I found myself skimming whole pages where nothing happened. I was also disappointed by the end, it didn't really wrap anything up for me at all.
  2 out of 5 stars.
• 
  Tentatively, Convenience

  review of
  Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships
  by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 29-May 10, 2019
  
  For the complete review go here:
  https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
  
  Sometime in the misty past few yrs I bought the "H. G. Wells Collection" by Doma Publishing for an absurdly low price like $5 & got the Kindle app to enable me to read it. I don't like reading off screens, even though I do it all the time. As such, I only took a brief glimpse at it. I considered reading all the Wells in chronological order, starting w/ The Time Machine, wch I've already read at least once, so I looked at the 1st page recently & was impressed by the writing but still didn't want to read it on-screen. Then I picked up a copy of Baxter's The Time Ships, written 100 yrs later, & decided to read that instead. It was perfect for providing the experience I wanted!
  
  Stephen Baxter's "Editor's Note" begins:
  
  "The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had just turned up as a manuscript in an unlabeled box, in a collection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity—"You might make something of it"—knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.
  
  "The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original "written by hand on a paper of such age that it has crumpled beyond repair." That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript's author, or origin." - p vii
  
  This device, the device of stating that what one is about to read is from a found manuscript, thusly hypothetically not making it fiction by the author, in this case Stephen Baxter, but of unknown nature as to whether it's fiction or fact, is a device probably more often used in the 19th & early 20th century than now. Whether it was ever effective in making readers of those times believe that the story might be 'fact' has always struck me as improbable. As such, in this instance, it seems to be Baxter's tribute to the style of Wells's original wch doesn't, however, begin that way. Instead, let's compare the beginning of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (1908). Its 1st chapter is entitled "The Finding of the Manuscript":
  
  "I reached the crumbled wall, and climbed round. There, I found Tonnison standing within a small excavation that he had made among the debris: he was brushing the dirt from something that looked like a book, much crumpled and dilapidated; and opening his mouth, every second or two, to bellow my name. As soon as he saw that I had come, he handed his prize to me, telling me to put it in my satchel so as to protect it from the damp, while he continued his explorations. This I did, first, however, running the pages through my fingers, and noting that they were closely filled with neat, old-fashioned writing which was quite legible" - p 10, Carroll & Graf 1983 paperback edition
  
  The Time Ships continues The Time Machine & the "Prologue" to The Time Ships mentions that their shared hero had been in "the nightmarish world of A.D. 802,701" so I decided to double-check this against the Wells story. When I searched the Kindle edition for "802,701" no results were found. I tried "A.D." next. That produced 500 matches & revealed that yrs are spelled out as words so I tried: "Eight Hundred Thousand and Seven Hundred and One A.D." &, yep, that worked: "our planet in the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One A.D. For that, I should explain, was the date the little dials of my machine recorded." so I didn't catch Baxter out at not following the original (not that I expected to).
  
  The Prologue continues by having the protagonist decide:
  
  "I had blood on my hands, and not just the ichor of those foul, degraded sub-men, the Morlocks, I determined I must make recompense—in whatever way I could—for my abominable treatment of poor, trusting Weena.
  
  "I was filled with resolve. My adventures, physical and intellectual, were not done yet!" - p xi
  
  Near the end of The Time Machine it's written that:
  
  "The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment—a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blown in."
  
  Has he gone forward in time again to try to find Weena, the Eloi last seen struggling in the kidnapping grip of some Morlocks? Baxter goes that route. As our hero goes off into the future again he checks his gear:
  
  "I found my Kodak, and dug out my flash trough. The camera was now loaded with a roll of a hundred negative frames on a paper-stripping roll. I remembered how damned expensive the thing had been when I had bought it—no less than tweny-five dollars, purchased on a trip to New York—but, if I should return with pictures of futurity, each of those two-inch frames would be more valuable than the finest paintings." - p xiii
  
  "This Original Kodak camera, introduced by George Eastman, placed the power of photography in the hands of anyone who could press a button. Unlike earlier cameras that used a glass-plate negative for each exposure, the Kodak came preloaded with a 100-exposure roll of flexible film. After finishing the roll, the consumer mailed the camera back to the factory to have the prints made. In capturing everyday moments and memories, the Kodak's distinctive circular snapshots defined a new style of photography--informal, personal, and fun.
  
  "George Eastman invented flexible roll film and in 1888 introduced the Kodak camera shown to use this film. It took 100-exposure rolls of film that gave circular images 2 5/8" in diameter. In 1888 the original Kodak sold for $25 loaded with a roll of film and included a leather carrying case." -
  https://americanhistory.si.edu/collec...
  
  As might be expected, Baxter's 'sequel' 'pulls out all the stops' & makes things considerably more far-fetched & dramatic than the original Wells bk:
  
  "At last, the sun came to a halt altogether, it rested on the western horizon, hot and pitiless and unchanging. The earth's rotation had been stilled; now, it rotated with one face turned perpetually to the sun!
  
  "The scientists of the nineteenth century had predicted that at last the tidal influences of sun and moon would cause the earth's rotation to become locked to the sun, just as the moon was forced to keep one face turned to earth. I had witnessed this myself, during my first exploration of futurity: but it was an eventuality that should not come about for many millions of years. And yet here I was, more than half a million years into the future, finding a stilled earth!" - p 12
  
  & to think he's only on page 12. But he ain't seen nuthin' yet.
  
  "There could be no doubt about it: I was traveling through events which differed, massively, from those I had witnessed during my first sojourn." - p 13
  
  "And then—it was quite sudden—the sun exploded." - p 14
  
  That cd really ruin a guy's day.
  
  On the back cover of the edition of The Time Ships that I have, the author is referred to as "today's most acclaimed new "hard SF" author, and the acknowledged heir to the visionary legacy of Wells, Heinlein, and Clarke". That might be in a parallel universe b/c I don't recall hearing about him until I got this bk, wch was published in 1995. Of course, I don't know EVERYTHING, just every other thing. Regardless, the notion of the multiverse wasn't postulated in MY universe until the mid-20th century so it's things like that that make this different from Wells's original The Time Machine. I admit, I wd've settled for the Time Traveller going back to the same future, finding Weena, & fucking her brains out w/ explicit description — but I can't fault Baxter for making the bk be an epic exploration of possibilities that cd be scientifically hypothetized way back in the 1990s before everyone had cell-phones & the world completely changed all over again.
  
  ANYWAY, in this new, improved, future the TT meets a Morlock & the damned thing speaks to him in English:
  
  ""I have access to records of all of the ancient languages of Humanity—as reconstructed—from Nostratic through the Indo-European group and its prototypes. A small number of key words is sufficient for the appropriate variant to be retrieved. You must inform me if anything I say is not intelligible."
  
  "I took a cautious step forward. "Ancient? And how do you know I am ancient?"
  
  "Huge lids swept down over those goggled eyes. "Your physique is archaic. As were the contents of your stomach when analyzed."" - p 40
  
  How dare you say my "physique is archaic"!! Ok, I admit, I've got a bit of a pot belly & my teeth are really worn down & my hair's thinned dramatically but you talk like I've been left behind in the dust evolutionarily!! Let's change the subject.
  
  In the original Wells bk, the Eloi lived above-ground in idyllic circumstances: never having to work & happy & playful all day. Practical matters, such as the provision of their food, was taken c/o for them by the Morlocks, who lived underground & tended great machines. Occasionally, the Morlocks wd take away some Eloi & eat them (if I remember correctly). The Eloi were so spoiled & air-headed that they'd become oblivious to this dynamic.
  
  I always interpreted this as a prediction as to what wd happen if society were to continue to be divided between exploiters & workers: the exploiters wd become Eloi, totally dependent on the labor of others for everything & enervated by lack of initiative; the workers becoming completely debased by forced labor w/ no time for anything else, devolving into cannibalistic trolls. Baxter's vision has the Morlocks as highly evolved beings living to a hive-like extreme. The reader sees humans continue as beings constantly at war, forced to live underground w/o sunlight — simultaneously developing into the sunlight-eschewing Morlocks & into sunlight-embracing humans who STILL war constantly. It seems to me that Baxter's version more or less bypasses the class issue (until almost the end & then just in passing (or classing)).
  
  "I know well—Nebogipfel taught me!—that much of my dread of the Morlocks is instinctive, and proceeds from a complex of experiences, nightmares and fears within my own soul, irrelevant to this place. I have had that dread of darkness and subterranean places since I was a boy; there is that fear of the body and its corruption which Nebogipfel diagnosed—a dread which I may share, I think, with many of my time—and, besides, I am honest enough to recognize that I am a man of my class, and as such have had little to do with the laboring folk of my time, and in my ignorance I have developed, I fear, a certain disregard and fear." - p 517
  
  "I leaned forward, as far as my restraints allowed. "Filby, I can scarcely believe that men have fallen so far—become so blind. Why, from my perspective, this damnable Future War of yours sounds pretty much like the end of civilization."
  
  ""For men of our day," he said solemnly, "perhaps it is. But this younger generation, who've grown up to know nothing but War, who have never felt the sun on their faces without fear of the air-torpedoes—well! I think they're inured to it; it's as if we're turning into a subterranean species."
  
  "I could not resist a glance at the Morlock." - p 172
  
  "But for all the familiar landmarks and street names, this was a new London: a London of permanent night, a city which could never enjoy the glow of the June sky outside—but a London which had accepted all this as the price for survival, Filby told me; for bombs and torpedoes would roll off that massive Roof, or burst in the air harmlessly, leaving Cobbett's "Great Wen" unmarked beneath." - p 187
  
  ""Tell me what this place is, before we leave it," I said.
  
  "His flaxen-haired head turned toward me. "An empty chamber."
  
  ""How wide?"
  
  ""Approximately two thousand miles."
  
  "I tried to conceal my reaction to this. Two thousand miles ? Had I been alone, in a prison cell large enough to hold an ocean? "You have a great deal of room here," I said evenly.
  
  ""The Sphere is large," he said. "If you are accustomed only to planetary distances, you may find it difficult to appreciate how large. The Sphere fills the orbit of the primal planet you called Venus. It has a surface area corresponding to nearly three hundred million earths—"" - p 54
  
  Yeah, show-off, but I'll bet the property taxes are out of this fuckin' world!! Of course, humans, being what we are (HEY! Don't even think that about me, SHIT-HEAD!) are in a nature reserve of sorts where they continue to blow the bejesuz out of each other:
  
  "The island-world flared brighter than the sun, for several hours, and I knew I was watching a titanic tragedy, made by man—or descendents of man.
  
  "Everywhere in my rocky sky—now I started looking for it—I saw the mark of War." - p 91
  
  There goes the neighborhood. Next thing you know, you'll have a rotating universe.
  
  ""The rotating-universe idea was first described some decades after your time—by Kurt Gödel, in fact."" - p 117
  
  You don't say. That Gödel really knew how to tighten the expanding waistband.
  
  "The Gödel metric is an exact solution of the Einstein field equations in which the stress–energy tensor contains two terms, the first representing the matter density of a homogeneous distribution of swirling dust particles (dust solution), and the second associated with a nonzero cosmological constant (see lambdavacuum solution). It is also known as the Gödel solution or Gödel universe.
  
  "This solution has many unusual properties—in particular, the existence of closed timelike curves that would allow time travel in a universe described by the solution. Its definition is somewhat artificial in that the value of the cosmological constant must be carefully chosen to match the density of the dust grains, but this spacetime is an important pedagogical example.
  
  "The solution was found in 1949 by Kurt Gödel."
  
  [..]
  
  "Because of the homogeneity of the spacetime and the mutual twisting of our family of timelike geodesics, it is more or less inevitable that the Gödel spacetime should have closed timelike curves (CTCs). Indeed, there are CTCs through every event in the Gödel spacetime. This causal anomaly seems to have been regarded as the whole point of the model by Gödel himself, who was apparently striving to prove, and arguably succeeded in proving, that Einstein's equations of spacetime are not consistent with what we intuitively understand time to be (i. e. that it passes and the past no longer exists, the position philosophers call presentism, whereas Gödel seems to have been arguing for something more like the philosophy of eternalism), much as he, conversely, succeeded with his incompleteness theorems in showing that intuitive mathematical concepts could not be completely described by formal mathematical systems of proof. See the book A World Without Time." -
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel_m...
  
  I'll take some of those Closed Timelike Curves anyday over that old-time religion. Heck'o'goshen, readers of this bk even get to meet Gödel as a character. What more cd you ask for?
  
  ""Time travel, by its very nature, results in the perturbation of History, and hence the generation, or discovery, of Worlds other than this. Therefore the task of the Time Traveler is to search—to search on, until that Final World is found—or built!"
  
  "By the time we left Gödel, my thoughts were racing. I resolved never to mock Mathematical Philosophers again, for this odd little man had journeyed further in Time, Space and Understanding, without leaving his office, than I ever had in my Time Machine! And I knew that I must indeed visit Gödel again soon . . . for I was convinced that I had seen a flask of raw Platnerite, tucked inside his crate!" - p 230
  
  Platnerite? Never touch the stuff. It's highly addictive & it makes you KA-rayayayay-zee!
  
  "As for me, after subsisting for so long on a diet of the Morlocks' bland stuff, I could not have relished my breakfast more if I had known—which I did not—that it was the last nineteenth-century meal I should ever enjoy!' - p 153
  
  OUR HERO has already been thru ALOT & there's still almost 400 pp to go in the bk.
  
  Chapter 11 in Book 3 is called "The New World Order" & takes place in London in 1938, perpetually at war w/ the Germans. Some of us became familiar w/ the phrase "New World Order" in the 1980s when Reagan was pushing the idea. Some of us transformed that into "New World Odor" — as in something smelled fishy about the idea of one government for the entire world — esp given that this government was based on the US being the 'good guys', as opposed to, say, primary resource grabbers, & as the world cop. Hitler's '2nd bk' is called My New Order but it's misleading to call it "Hitler's Own Sequel to Mein Kampf" as the cover of it proclaimed given that it was really a bk cobbled together by American editors of Hitler speeches designed to show Hitler's genocidal & imperialistic intentions & NOT really a bk by Hitler. Still, I've long since wondered whether Reagan & his right-wing cronies deliberately referenced Hitler w/ their New World Order.
  
  In the London of 1938, basically a giant bomb shelter deprived of sunlight:
  
  "Wallis told me that people would still turn out to the Speakers' Corner, to hear the Salvation Army, the National Secular Society, the Catholic Evidence Guild, the Anti-Fifth Column League (who waged a campaign against spies, traitors and anyone who might give comfort to the enemy), and so forth." - pp 206-207
  
  I'll be giving a speech in a few days that references the Speakers' Corner so if I don't finish this review before I've uploaded the documents for that I'll add a link here.
  
  The history Baxter provides for this era is a parallel universe one for the one that I assume my readers & I both have been born after. In this case, the race to build a Time Machine becomes a parallel for the race to build (& drop) the atom bomb (although that comes along too).
  
  "He said in a low voice, "We have rumors that the Germans are building a Time Machine of their own. And if they succeed first—if the Reich gets functioning Chronic-Displacement Warfare capabilities . . ."" - p 217
  
  ""You develop your time ironclads because you fear the Germans are doing the same. Very well. But the situation is symmetrical: from their point of view, the Germans must fear that you will exploit such time machinery first. Each side is behaving precisely in such a way as to provoke the worst reaction in its opponents. And you both slide towards the worst situation for all."" - p 313
  
  Replace the Human Race w/ the Arms Race. What about the Peace & Prosperity Race? The Positive Creativity Race? What if nations worked hard at improving everyone's lot & got credit when they succeeded?
  
  For the complete review go here:
  https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
• 
  OliveTree

  ***light thematic spoilers***
  
  This review won't be meaningful to you (none of my reviews are, hah) but this book was meaningful to me. It's a big, weird, long, hard sci-fi adventure story, and I missed an opportunity for a sick bathroom joke just now but decided against it for professionalism's sake
  
  who am i kidding im not professional
  
  I'm just gonna lay it out on the floor here, okay, I really enjoyed my time with this book. This is a review, but I can't quantify why, okay? Was it the weird, contemplative storytelling, the way it used strong imagery and lengthy asides to build a genuine mood and sense of place, not unlike Wells 100 years prior? Could it have been the genuinely investing characters or the clever application of science, mostly theoretical?
  
  There were stages where the science was less than correct. Baxter relates the lack of stars in every point in the sky as proof that the universe cannot be truly infinite, which is a fine observation but a better explanation is that the universe isn't truly infinitely old, and the light of stars farther away from us hasn't had the time to reach us. This understanding would have actually played very well into the scene and I'm surprised it wasn't brought up. Aside from one scene which explains the science of how light can push things, so solar sails are possible (light has no mass but has speed and momentum so it has a physical effect on things when it touches it. if you take a super fine material in space you can use strong light sources to push that material like a sail and fly around, theoretically) the effect of light and lightspeed is almost never addressed.
  
  The time machine is one of my favorite books of all time, and it's very possible that this will end up being one of those as well. But neither of those are necessarily for any of those books merits, and I'm a little bit not sold on the concept of a work of art having "merits" anyway. Art is subjective, in both the creation and consumption of it. There is no objective lense, nothing, and it feels tempting to think of one, like an everlasting holy grail there in the distance, especially if you write reviews, but whos standard are you reviewing by, if that's the case?? Is it yours anymore, is it even a human perspective to begin with?
  
  I loved this book and was moved by this book because I'm at a point in my life where everything being impermanent is hitting me harder than I thought it would. I've moved out of my childhood home of which I've lived for as long as I remember, one of my pets passed away not too long ago, and one of my other pets is getting very old. Sometimes it feels like, through no fault of my own, I've crossed between timelines, linearly traveling through time locking off past experiences and lives forever. The Time Traveler begins on his journey to return to the future, only to find himself divorcing himself from everything he's ever known, thus beginning this 500 page odyssey of time and science. But, through the ever convoluting plot, he finds himself able to return, truly return, to his home timeline
  
  and he doesnt.
  
  The story paints change as, if perhaps existentially terrifying, inevitable, and freeing. Status quo will change but you can move with it and change the future. You can resettle, and find the adventure wherever you land. It takes 500 pages and a buttload of reading on metaphysics and time and the philosophies and understandings of time travel, down to the very birth of the universe, but it used all of that to hone in on one simple moral. You cannot return to the past, and that's okay. You'll be fine.
  
  Whether this will be useful to you depends. I can't tell you that.
• 
  Jenessa Gayheart

  I started reading this right away the first day of January. Oddly, it turned out, I had to stop reading at page 300. Pages 301-309 were substituted with pages I'd already read, 179-183, and then it jumped back to 310! It was a book-binding issue in production of the book! I was at a loss for what happened in that missing section, and had to order another copy before reading the rest. And yet, I thought it might be a clever gimmick in the book, since it is Stephen Baxter's "The Time Ships," and at 309 the story jumped back in time, so to speak. But no, the second book I ordered had everything in the right place.
  
  “The Time Ships” is a sequel to H.G. Wells’ century-old tale of “The Time Machine.” I did read that original book finally in November/December of last year. It is a short read, and Wells wrote it in first-person as the time traveler (never named in the book. In the excellent movie he is given the name Alexander Hartdegen played by Guy Pierce. It’s a wonderful movie with a great soundtrack by Klaus Badelt). The voice of the story is particular, and to me sounds very much like a science professor telling a tale. It’s not very fanciful with juicy personalities and surprise perspectives like the stories I typically enjoy, but it is filled with the wonder of scientific discovery as though time travel really existed and this were truly the first reaction of the person who invented it. Stephen Baxter mastered that same voice perfectly in his continuation of the story.
  
  In Time Ships, Alexander (though again in the book he is not ever named) has already lived through Wells' original book’s adventures and embarks on a second trip. Then a third. Circumstances force him to take more trips and to live in extremely old and extremely “new” ages. His surroundings in each new scene, and his meeting of people he knew “before” as well as new people of a new age, were interesting to me. The sort of steampunkish juggernauts he finds himself traveling in were exciting to envision and imagine hearing.
  
  The first new person he meets, however, is very knowledgeable and stoically world-wise (as in the practice of Stoicism, not just holding a non-reactive demeanor). They end up having conversations on metaphysics that I had to forcefully wade through and pretend to grasp. However, that very sense of having to understand something that’s foreign to my mind lent to my “reader’s time-traveling experience” as a whole. Alexander himself seemed to struggle through concepts of timelines and how people evolve or even seem to devolve as a society.
  
  The non-action concepts that I personally did enjoy most were his ruminations on how people grow and then lose coherence with what we all take for granted right now, visioning it as a natural phenomenon, a logical chain of phases in the human fluidity of experience. Intelligent creatures grow or weaken according to needs or certain organic stimuli for things like developing language or clothing, relationships, or a certain appreciation for surroundings they see or touch, then over centuries they let go of things or abilities they don’t need anymore.
  
  While I imagine a lot of people who are more scientifically minded could enjoy an aspect of this tale that I was not able to, as a more imagination/storytelling/world-building mind I was not disappointed by this winding, rich, logical and creative story.