The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A worthy sequel to The Time Machine
HG Wells’s The Time Machine is rightly acknowledged as a Science Fiction Masterwork. It’s spawned two movies and two TV series (and counting), the best and most faithful adaptation being the 1960 George Pal movie, and the concepts and tropes it created have found their way into countless books and comics, so much so that a lot of the ideas that went into its creation feel commonplace to us now. But if you imagine what it must have been like when The Time Machine was first being written in the 1890s, before many of these concepts were even considered, you begin to appreciate the sheer feat of speculative imagination it represents.
Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships (published 100 years later) is the only official sequel recognised by the estate of HG Wells and I can only imagine the incredible pressure Baxter felt when it came to writing something that had to live up to such a well-regarded book. But he does a fantastic job, staying faithful to the original but also taking advantage of developments in scientific thinking and insight into the nature of time (and the universe as a whole) that emerged after Wells’s death. In Baxter’s hands, the time traveller brings his nineteenth century sensibility to these scientific marvels and it’s a particular strength of the story that the traveller is able to make sense of modern scientific theory within that framework of his own understanding.
The book starts immediately after the original ended, with the time traveller determined to return to the far future where he left Weena at the mercy of the Morlocks. But as he travels forward once more, he realises the future has changed. The simple fact of his return has meant time has branched as the ‘many worlds theory’ predicts. Now seemingly cut off from Weena he stops on a future Earth completely changed. Baxter again makes use of more modern scientific concepts here (and later in the book) to imagine a truly remarkable future that – notwithstanding Wells’s powers of imagination – would, I suspect, be beyond him simply because of the times he lived in. Science fiction authors are sometimes good at extrapolation from current state, but they are not supernatural prognosticators.
Seemingly marooned in this new future, the traveller experiences many wonders, but jumps at the chance to return home. Again however, he is trapped in his own causality. Home is not the same. The evidence of his scientific discoveries have created a quantum leap in scientific thought and precipitated a Great War (before the First and Second World Wars we remember), which has led to a weaponisation of time travel technology. Whenever the traveller tries to make things better, they get worse and he throws himself into the time streams again to discover yet more weirdness and adventure.
The plot rattles along and there are tragic human moments among the marvels and odd divergences from the history we remember. Towards the end of the book there is a section that feels more like a protracted cosmological science lesson, but the action soon picks up and Baxter ties everything together with a satisfying conclusion that – again – maintains faith with the original text. Highly recommended.
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