Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Remarkable, 27 May 2001
By A Customer
Normally I do not approve of a follow-up or sequel to the work of another author, whether dead or living. However, such is the power and profundity of The Time Ships that I would have to make an exception in this case. Baxter cleverly adopts some of the style of the original H.G.Wells classic, without compromising his own epic approach to SF. The story is a tour de force, taking the reader backwards and forwards across great gulfs of time, dipping into alternative histories which twist and turn...The excitement never lets up until the jaw-dropping ending.
The Time Ships stands on its own as an SF classic, and is as good as anything that Clarke or Bear or Silverberg have ever written. Baxter is quite simply in the SF Premier League with the best of them, in my humble opinion.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worthy sequel to Wells's classic, 13 Aug 2004
Time travel has always been my favorite genre of science fiction, yet it is probably one of the hardest to get right. Aside from the science of time travel, there's the eternal paradoxes that time travel poses - such as how one can travel to the past, effect change (after all, where's the fun in traveling through time if you can't muck about with it?), and not create an impossible conundrum in the process. Wells's The Time Machine (Penguin Classics) neatly stepped around the whole problem by having his unnamed Traveler voyage into the future rather than the past. By contrast, Stephen Baxter tackles these issues head-on in this follow-up to Wells's story, a worthy sequel to a landmark work of science fiction.
Picking up neatly where Wells left off, Baxter's tale ranges far into the future and back to the beginning of Time itself, encountering realities profoundly affected by the invention of time travel. Accompanying the Traveler is Nebogipfel, a Morlock unlike any invented by Wells. Nebogipfel is a sensitive character who supplies the modern scientific explanations to what the 19th century narrator encounters, and the friendship that emerges between the two of them is one of the highlights of this book,
Nebogipfel also serves to answer many of the traditional paradoxes of time travel that appear in the course of their travels in time. Though many will find the explanations unsatisfactory, Baxter should be commended for confronting them head-on and creating a much richer novel in the process. Fans of the original novel will also respect his homage to Wells and the respect that Baxter pays to many of the Wells's ideas, though in the end this is a must-read for any fan of brilliantly imagined, well-written science fiction.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A ripping cosmological yarn!, 6 Jul 1999
By A Customer
I'm certain Wells and Baxter fans will dig this. References from numerous HG stories are here, so those in the know can spot 'The Plattner Story', 'The Land Ironclads', 'The War of the Worlds', as well as 'The Time Machine', and probably many others this reviwer missed. Baxter's attempt to imitate a turn-of -the-century writing style does not fully work, often ringing false, but it's good fun, and a first person account is essential to maintain a continuity of texture with the original 'Time Machine'; this is nicely achieved. All Baxter's best bits are present and correct- scientific concepts lifted from mathematics and cosmology papers, Universe altering technologies described with his mixture of the epic and mundane, and humans surviving(or not) against a harsh environment. Cameos from real historical personages, including a certain Writer, add humour and also poignancy, without the cornyness you might expect. And the end, a beautiful piece of plot and style, does not disappoint. And if you don't care for Wells or Baxter, just read this for an inspiring, well written(I have to say it) 'yarn'.
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