The Time Ships

"The Time Ships was written for the centenary of H. G. Wells ’ The Time Machine . I’m generally suspicious of sequels and prequels to classic books being written by modern authors, but in this case it really works. His idea was that when Wells was writing, he was drawing on what was, at the time, the most cutting-edge scientific, cultural and sociological ideas going, for the creation of his future. And he takes that idea and runs with it. In The Time Ships, the time traveller from Wells’ novel has returned to London in 1895, but begins to feel guilty about having left behind the Eloi girl who trusted him. So he attempts to travel once more into the future, but discovers that his actions – the very existence of him and his time machine – have altered the future, and she no longer exists in the timeline in which he travels. So instead, he travels to a human future where humanity has built what’s called a Dyson sphere – a theoretical object posed by an American scientist called Freeman Dyson, which is a way of harnessing every single atom of energy from the sun. It’s a complete sphere, which goes around the sun, and on the inside of it is a vast world. It’s been built just inside the orbit of Mercury. On the underside of this sphere is a society of technological creatures that keep the sphere running, and on the inside is a less technologically advanced human society. So it’s similar to Wells’ world of Eloi and Morlocks. He travels back hoping to get home and ends up in a kind of domed London in the 1940s, which is still fighting the First World War ; and then he goes back to the Palaeocene era; and then he comes back… it’s one of those stories which just gets bigger and bigger. I think it was the first novel that I read which extrapolated on scientific ideas to this galactic degree: the ramifications of his actions become bigger and bigger and echo out. It’s not just, ‘he kills his own dad and he’s never born,’ that basic time travel stuff. After I read it, I encountered Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Man and books like that, which I now realise were a huge influence on The Time Ships and do a lot of the same things that Baxter was doing – but I love that book partly because it’s the first of that type that I read. The Three Body Problem is another very similar idea, in that it’s starting from first contact with aliens, but then extrapolating the problems of two little worlds in a vast universe, out to universal galactic proportions covering all of time and space. I also love The Time Ships because it’s written in what could have been quite a hokey Wells-apeing style, from the perspective of a Victorian gentleman – which could have been very cheesy, but actually grounds the ideas really nicely. He’s a character that you can relate to. In a lot of these stories, particularly in Stapledon, they go off so far into the ether that you feel a bit lost in the vast universe – as so many of us do on such a regular basis! But in The Time Ships , because he’s writing from the perspective of a slightly baffled and confused Victorian gent, it always feels like we know where we are in the story. Yeah! I recently read The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez, where everyone’s flying around on wooden ships, essentially, from planet to planet. I think if I was to write a sci fi novel – I mean, FloodWorld , my children’s trilogy, is essentially science fiction, but it doesn’t really go close to any kind of quantum theory – if I was going to write an interplanetary sci fi, I would be very attracted to the idea of bringing things quite back to basics. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that the original Alien III was supposed to be set on a manmade wooden planet. I really love those kinds of ideas. I don’t have the brain power or the scientific background to start thinking about quantum theory, except in a glib Ant Man way – and there’s quite enough of that going on at the moment as there is!"