The Time Ships (SF) - Stephen Baxter ****

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.

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog