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The Time Ships

The Time Ships

List Price: $7.99
Your Price: $7.19
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A worthy successor to the original
Review: "The Time Ships" is a stunning novel, both in style and substance. Baxter captures the innocent, rollicking tone of the original while adding a healthy dose of contemporary science. Granted, the invented time-travelling substance he invents here is a bit silly, and I saw one major plot point about twenty pages in, but the fast-paced, future-past-present-future-past storyline never lets up long enough for you to be bothered by any potential weakness.

Baxter is a brilliant writer with some incredibly original ideas. This book is packed with enough original ideas to fill ten novels. At the same time, he's managed to draw characters that actually matter - something Baxter has had trouble doing in the past.

Baxter owes a lot to Clarke and Bear. He's also his own writer. Probably the best Hard SF writer to appear on the scene in the last 10 years. Don't be put off by the occasional bad review: Baxter is a great talent and "The Time Ships" is an example of him at the top of his form.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Inventive!
Review: I can't believe it took me so long to discover Stephen Baxter, but now that I have, I've been racing to catch up on all his novels. The most fun so far is this sequel to Wells' The Time Machine. If you've only seen the Pal movie you'll notice some minor divergences, since it picks up where the original book left off, not the movie, but by no means will you be lost. Integrating the latest theoretical physics, you ride along with the traveler as he returns to that distant future... or tries to. H.G. would have loved it!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Another Example of Sci-Fi as Cheap Sub Literature
Review: Sci-Fi stuff can be entertanning, but rarely or never you will find there real literature, beauty, happy lines, metaphores worth the reading. Baxter is not an exception in this barren landscape. As Clarke and Asimov, but without inventing nothing by himself, just adding and mixing everything he has got reading Wells and the others Big names, Baxter follows the old path of gigantism in scale and a style of writting that is almosty unbearable dry and dead, a chewing-gum kind of prose you already know as if every Sci-Fi book was written by the same Writting Program 1.0. In fact, though nothing less than eternity, full galaxies, artificial worlds, etc are enough for this guy, as always and as happens with every author of this genre since Verne, you cannot find in between all that huge space and time room just one real person beyond the most generic and schematic features. Scientifically trainned or scientists themselves, it seems that Sci-Fi authors simply does not have what is neccesary to understand and create real people. So they usually are more comfortable with aliens, robots, machines, hyperspace, ships, lasers and the full Lukas stuff. As any other heroe of this genre, Baxter's heroe does not have sex, love or personality beyond some abstract traits and his profession as a scientist. In this case, we must accept, Baxter made an effort and added a mechanical propension to feel fear and yell. The poor chap spend all the time trought almost each the 500 pages yelling and hidding. Perhaps Baxter believes that's enough.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Worthy Successor to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine
Review: Baxter does an excellent job of blending current scientific and ecological theories with the look and feel of the original story of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Most importantly, he does this with the proper mood and writing style of the era of the original--a much more difficult feat than most people would think. He also does a good job of projecting the politics of Wells' characters. The only real drawback for me is that the main character is just insufficiently thoughtful and intelligent about a subject that he has devoted a good portion of his life to. While this provides an expedient way for his Morlock companion to explain many things to him, and thus the reader--a fine literary technique--the main character's rashness and simplicity is sometimes frustrating to an intelligent reader. While this precludes a five star rating, it should not prevent you from picking up and reading this strong novel. Donald J. Bingle, Author of Forced Conversion

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: More Annoying Than Jar Jar Binks
Review: HG Wells was the antithesis of a "hard" sci-fi writer. In the original Time Machine, technology took a back seat in what was ultimately a poignant, haunting meditation on desire and alienation.

To take that framework and use it for a ham-fisted treatise as Baxter does is grotesque to say the least.



Rating: 5 stars
Summary: BEst Sequel
Review: Baxter was born with one purpose and one only.

To write the Time Machine II of which a movie should be made.

This book is BEATIFULL and i love the classic

I read 7 years ago i just happened to pass by and saw some negative and said this aint fair not to a work like this...

so... enjoy.....

IT is a H G Well -- Jules Verne kind of thing..:O)


Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Maybe the best time travel novel ever!
Review: Those who enjoyed The Time Machine classic will delight in this sequel--if only H.G. Wells could have lived to read it! This is my first Stephen Baxter book. He is clearly a remarkably intelligent and creative scientist who can write great fiction. I found this novel believable; that is no mean feat when you're reading about Eloi and Morlocks. I can't recommend The Time Ships highly enough...it's like taking the vacation of your dreams.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Worthy sequel to Wells's classic
Review: 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 classic "The Time Machine" 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.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good story, though it's rather overlong
Review: Only recently did I learn of Stephen Baxter's authorized sequel to Wells' "The Time Machine", one of my favorite books. This is without a doubt the best sci-fi story I have ever read. Baxter's beginning blends beautifully with the ending of Wells' story and explains why the Time Traveller never returned to his home in 1897.

Baxter's creativity brings a sense of wonder to the reader that is pure joy and adventure. (While reading it, I even listened to the sound track from the original "Time Machine" movie and the Russell Garcia score just made the entire experience even better). The story's ending was very emotional and showed that, for all the Time Traveller had seen and experienced - from the beginning of time to the end of the world - it was his human feelings toward another that mattered the most.

One last observation - It was my thinking that Baxter left the story open ended for another possible sequel involving the Time Traveller's adventures with the Morlocks. I can only hope that is true, for he has all the time in the world...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Fairly Good
Review: Overall I thought this was a fairly good book. Very entertaining and interesting to get back to original story.

Not bad.


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