The Time Ships
Cover of HarperCollins 1996
mass market paperback edition |
|
| Author | Stephen Baxter |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Published | 1995 (HarperCollins) |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 454 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 59965735 |
The Time Ships is a 1995 science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter. A sequel to The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, it was officially authorised by the Wells estate to mark the centenary of the original's publication. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award in 1996, as well as the British Science Fiction Association Award in 1995. It was also nominated for the Hugo, Clarke, and Locus Awards in 1996.
After the events related in The Time Machine, the Time Traveller (his first name, Moses, is given in the novel but applied to the Time Traveller's younger self) prepares, in 1891, to return to the year 802,701 and save Weena, the Eloi who died in the fire with the Morlocks. He reveals that the quartz construction of the time machine is suffused with a radioactive substance he calls Plattnerite for the mysterious benefactor who gave him the sample to study twenty years earlier, in 1871.
The Time Traveller departs into the future and stops in AD 657,208 when he notes the daytime sky has gone permanently dark. He arrives and is abducted by a branch of Morlocks more culturally advanced than the ones he met before. One of their number, Nebogipfel (the name of a character from Wells's The Chronic Argonauts), explains after hearing the Time Traveller's own story that the conflict between Eloi and Morlocks never occurred due to the Writer's publication of the story that became The Time Machine. The timeline he sought to go to is inaccessible to him now. The Morlocks of this timeline have constructed a Dyson sphere around the inner solar system and use the Sun's energy to power it. Humans as the Time Traveller knows them live on the sunlit inner surface of the Sphere while the Morlocks live on the outer shell. The Time Traveller convinces Nebogipfel that he will help him understand the time travelling mechanism of the Time machine if the Morlock takes him back to it.
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