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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

Search This Blog