Product Description

The highly-acclaimed sequel to H G Wells's The Time Machine, from the heir to Arthur C. Clarke. Written to celebrate the centenary of the publication of H G Wells's classic story The Time Machine, Stephen Baxter's stunning sequel is an outstanding work of imaginative fiction. The Time Traveller has abandoned his charming and helpless Eloi friend Weena to the cannibal appetites of the Morlocks, the devolved race of future humans from whom he was forced to flee. He promptly embarks on a second journey to the year AD 802,701, pledged to rescue Weena. He never arrives! The future was changed by his presence! and will be changed again. Hurled towards infinity, the Traveller must resolve the paradoxes building around him in a dazzling temporal journey of discovery. He must achieve the impossible if Weena is to be saved.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48619 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
What if the time machine from H.G. Wells' classic novel of the same name had fallen into government hands? That's the question that led Stephen Baxter to create this modern-day sequel, which combines a basic Wellsian premise with a Baxteresque universe-spanning epic. The Time Traveller, driven by his failure to save Weena from the Morlocks, sets off again for the future. But this time the future has changed, altered by the very tale of the Traveller's previous journey.

About the Author
Stephen Baxter applied to become an astronaut in 1991. He didn't make it, but achieved the next best thing by becoming a science fiction writer, and his novels and short stories have been published and won awards around the world. His science background is in maths and engineering. He is married and lives in Buckinghamshire.

Customer Reviews

Remarkable
Normally I do not approve of a follow-up or sequel to the work of another author, whether dead or living. However, such is the power and profundity of The Time Ships that I would have to make an exception in this case. Baxter cleverly adopts some of the style of the original H.G.Wells classic, without compromising his own epic approach to SF. The story is a tour de force, taking the reader backwards and forwards across great gulfs of time, dipping into alternative histories which twist and turn...The excitement never lets up until the jaw-dropping ending.
The Time Ships stands on its own as an SF classic, and is as good as anything that Clarke or Bear or Silverberg have ever written. Baxter is quite simply in the SF Premier League with the best of them, in my humble opinion.

Worthy sequel to Wells's classic
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 The Time Machine (Penguin Classics) 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.

A ripping cosmological yarn!
I'm certain Wells and Baxter fans will dig this. References from numerous HG stories are here, so those in the know can spot 'The Plattner Story', 'The Land Ironclads', 'The War of the Worlds', as well as 'The Time Machine', and probably many others this reviwer missed. Baxter's attempt to imitate a turn-of -the-century writing style does not fully work, often ringing false, but it's good fun, and a first person account is essential to maintain a continuity of texture with the original 'Time Machine'; this is nicely achieved. All Baxter's best bits are present and correct- scientific concepts lifted from mathematics and cosmology papers, Universe altering technologies described with his mixture of the epic and mundane, and humans surviving(or not) against a harsh environment. Cameos from real historical personages, including a certain Writer, add humour and also poignancy, without the cornyness you might expect. And the end, a beautiful piece of plot and style, does not disappoint. And if you don't care for Wells or Baxter, just read this for an inspiring, well written(I have to say it) 'yarn'.