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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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