Kelson Reads reviewed The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
Dramatically Expanded
4 stars
A sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, written for the novel's 100th anniversary and authorized by Wells' estate. It picks up immediately after the end of the original, following the Time Traveler's journeys through several different futures, Earth's distant past, and all the way to the dawn of time. Baxter effectively mimics Wells' style and the 1890s well-off narrator's perspective, which (combined with the experience of multiple futures) reminds me of Moorcock's Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy.
With the advantage of another 100 years' worth of scientific discoveries, and knowledge of how the real 20th century turned out, Baxter drastically increases the scope of the travels. Paradoxes and causality loops weave through the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. In one timeline, the Morlocks build a Dyson sphere. In another, clusters of nanobots re-colonize a world that's no longer hospitable to humans. Much of the middle is …
A sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, written for the novel's 100th anniversary and authorized by Wells' estate. It picks up immediately after the end of the original, following the Time Traveler's journeys through several different futures, Earth's distant past, and all the way to the dawn of time. Baxter effectively mimics Wells' style and the 1890s well-off narrator's perspective, which (combined with the experience of multiple futures) reminds me of Moorcock's Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy.
With the advantage of another 100 years' worth of scientific discoveries, and knowledge of how the real 20th century turned out, Baxter drastically increases the scope of the travels. Paradoxes and causality loops weave through the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. In one timeline, the Morlocks build a Dyson sphere. In another, clusters of nanobots re-colonize a world that's no longer hospitable to humans. Much of the middle is tied up in an alternate World War that, instead of ending in 1918, kept going for decades. And just like the war, there are chapters that drag on longer than they should.
(Back to Moorcock, the war chapters feature extra-large all-terrain tanks that reminded me of the walking fortress in The Land Leviathan...though now that I look into it, both are probably based on the vehicles in Wells' story, "The Land Ironclads.")
He does get a bit bogged down in technicalities. Wells didn't care how the time machine worked, he wanted to tell an allegory about class relations. Fortunately, Baxter is more interested in what time travel does than how the machine accomplishes it, and "Plattnerite" turns out to be more of a MacGuffin than anything else. But he's still more interested in the implications of changing histories and long timespans than in any deeper look at society than the futility of war...and perhaps a broadening perspective of who counts as human.