Morlock Night

Rating:
Summary: Hardly an appropriate Sequel
Review: Jeter utterly fails to make a convincing sequel to Wells' "The Time Machine" by worming magic and legend into a novel where it hardly belongs. Although Jeter does well in approximating Wells' style, his loping prose, he fails to carry through with the sort of "scientific romance" that so characterized Wells' work. Instead, "Morlock Night" is a piece of weak fantasy, almost entirely divorced from its scientific foundations, and almost impossible to finish. To add to the other wrongs, Jeter tries to reinterpret the Morlocks themselves, making them a highly technological species, and far removed from their origins, thereby dashing the allegories that Wells worked so hard to establish. If you must read a sequel to "The Time Machine", read "The Time Ships".

Rating:
Summary: Hardly an appropriate Sequel
Review: Jeter utterly fails to make a convincing sequel to Wells' "The Time Machine" by worming magic and legend into a novel where it hardly belongs. Although Jeter does well in approximating Wells' style, his loping prose, he fails to carry through with the sort of "scientific romance" that so characterized Wells' work. Instead, "Morlock Night" is a piece of weak fantasy, almost entirely divorced from its scientific foundations, and almost impossible to finish. To add to the other wrongs, Jeter tries to reinterpret the Morlocks themselves, making them a highly technological species, and far removed from their origins, thereby dashing the allegories that Wells worked so hard to establish. If you must read a sequel to "The Time Machine", read "The Time Ships".

Rating:
Summary: and I had such high hopes...
Review: The idea of the Morlocks using the time machine to menace Victorian London is a good one - I'd like to see someone else give it a shot.

I first saw a reference to this book in a science fiction encyclopedia, under the "Cyberpunk" entry. But it's not really cyberpunk, or even science fiction. It's a rather poor fantasy novel, with more sorcery than science fiction. If the idea of the Morlock-fighting protagonists, including Merlin and King Arthur, running about London's oldest and deepest sewers, which are actually remnants of Atlantis, in a recovered Atlantean submarine sounds stupid to you, then you'll understand why it was a struggle to make myself finish reading this thing.