The Time Ships

Author: Stephen Baxter

1995 was the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and in celebration Stephen Baxter produced one of the best novels in his long and distinguished career. Written as a direct sequel to Wells's original, the novel starts with the time traveller returning to the time when he hopes to save Weena, but he finds everything has changed. The mere fact of having written The Time Machine has changed history, and consequently the time traveller and a Morlock companion set off on an adventure that takes them back to when the Time Traveller began his researches, encounters travellers from a World War I still going on in 1938, traps them in the Paleocene, takes them forward to a future in which nanotech entities control the universe, and eventually takes them back to the beginning so that the circle of time is completed and all events become inevitable. Why it's on the list: Baxter is one of the best of the New Hard SF writers, with works like the Xeelee Sequence, Voyage, Coalescent and more recently Proxima, so although Wells has been an influence throughout his career, this Wellsian time travel adventure was something of a departure. Nevertheless, by bringing to the story his skill at writing hard science and his penchant for mind-boggling vistas, he found something new and contemporary in the story. The novel won the BSFA, Philip K. Dick and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards.