The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 May 2011
by Stephen Baxter
With The Time Machine, H. G. Wells more or less inaugurated the subgenre of sci-fi that concerns itself with time travel. There have been thousands of time travel stories, including at least one (The Return of the Time Machine) that purported to be a sequel to Wells's classic. This book, too, takes Wells's fantasy, which was political as much as scientific, as its starting point. Here, though, Stephen Baxter soon dispatches with Wells's critique of social Darwinism and focuses on more contemporary themes of mankind's warlike tendencies and sprawling technology. And yet, he somehow pulls it off. It is a difficult task for the writer to put down compelling hard science fiction while adhering to an original's nineteenth century tone, voice, language, and scientific sensibilities. Baxter has varying success which threatens, at first, to become tedious, but which he manages to pilot in a fast-moving adventure far forward and even farther backwards through time. After the adventures in the original story, our nameless narrator departs again for the future of the Morlock and the Eloi, to rescue his lost Weena. But, in a deft twist that evokes the modern many-worlds theory, the journey forward take us to a completely different future. Baxter, therefore, does not have to confine himself to Wells's original vision. On the other hand, he does evoke many of Wells's themes from several of his works, while we journey to a world of advanced and benign Morlocks. The shifts in history make our narrator more and more compelled to correct the changes his time machine has imposed on the universe. But we have many worlds now, and each jump in time introduces us to a new universe affected by previous jumps. Our narrator and a Morlock stowaway go back to stop the time machine from ever being created. The paradoxes and time loops multiply, and they get stuck traveling forward again into a world immersed in a long, dark and violent war. They escape into the deep prehistoric past. And back to another universe populated by mechanical beings whose sole evolutionary purpose is the accumulation of information. Aspects of these time leaps are reptitive, but this is not too distracting. A common theme, however, is that, given enough time, in any universe, humans will obliterate the Earth's ecosystem while pursuing an existence ever more dependent on technology and information. This bleak path is portrayed as one without a moral dimension. This may have been the way a scientifically-minded H. G. Wells would have viewed the issue. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this question, and therefore much of this story, is somewhat morally ambiguous. Just because a wondrous info-technological future is possible, or even probable, doesn't make it necessarily the best possible future. While Baxter's narrator laments the loss of planet Earth. His Morlock fellow traveler sees it as a necessary cost for humanity's evolution. In the meantime, they both travel into a far distant past, beyond even the Big Bang, where they gain almost metaphysical insight into evolutionary destiny. And still, this is a destiny almost entirely alienated from nature, and tied up in nature's dominance by human intelligence. So, Baxter raises many intriguing questions (and our narrator has the answer that suits him best when time once again loops around) while pulling off the rather difficult trick of speaking with a voice that echoes H. G. Wells. It is as if he has done some time traveling himself. His narrator's thoughts on our lives immersed in time and the ultimate vastness of time and space are often subtle and even elegiac. The overall adventure is a fantastical romp through time, with sensitive and faithful nods to the master Baxter has chosen to follow.
(This "sequel" to H. G. Wells's The Time Machine was officially authorized by the Wells estate as part of an anniversary celebration of that classic author. The book also was awarded the 1996 Philip K. Dick prize.)
Also by Baxter (with Arthur C. Clarke): [Time's Eye] [Sunstorm]