The Time Ships

By Stephen Baxter, 1995

The main character of the "Time Machine" travels again to the future, but instead of finding Weena, the idyllic Eloi and the ugly stupid Morlocks... discovers an advanced race living on a ring orbiting around the sun. What is happening? Indeed, our main character just discovered the "Multiplicity", meaning multiverse: the Time Machine created alternative timelines. Making a new friend in Nebogipfel, his journey through the Multiplicity is just starting, to the limits of time and even beyond...

An impressive sequel to H.G Wells's "Time Machine". Lots of ideas around alternative realities and an attempt to make the "Time Machine" more accurate, introducing the green powder, the platternite, as key to understand time travel. Stephen Baxter is known to be a typical "Hard-SF" writer, and this especially true here. He sheds a new light to Wells' works, adding modern concepts like time paradoxs, nanorobots, and recent physics theory.

Many references to the original plots can also be noted. For example, the "Carolinium" is similar to uranium but has the additional property of a blazing continual explosion as a reference to "The World Set Free" (Wells, 1914). Check on Wikipedia for more ;)

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