The Land Ironclads appear in all their terrifying glory, The War in the Air occurs as a historical event, and The Shape of Things to Come is namechecked in dialogue. Along the way, I caught references to several other Wells works. There’s more than just The Time Machine in this book’s DNA.

But even a somewhat lacklustre climax can’t ruin how fascinating the journey to get there is. The final act of the book involves a lot of quantum physics and paradoxes, and I’ll admit to having trouble following what was going on.

As a result, some are better than others. It’s all quite interesting, but the various sections don’t feel very connected to one another. This does lead to a rather meandering narrative. Each period gets its own lengthy exploration, and for a lot of the book there’s no more plot than an attempt to uncover how the Traveller can fix time. Stops along the way include the Traveller’s younger years, an alternate World War, the Palaeolithic era, and more. Then the Traveller (and a Morlock passenger) go on a trip across time to work out what has happened. In just the opening few chapters, Baxter ticked a lot of my boxes. There are no Eloi anymore, and the Morlocks have built a Dyson Sphere around the Sun. But when he gets there, he finds that something has altered the future. The Time Ships picks up directly after the original, with the Traveller packing his backs for a return to the future. On the basis of these two books, I really need to check out more of Baxter’s novels. Coming into The Time Ships, my one question was ‘can Baxter strike twice?’ The answer is a solid yes. The War of the Worlds is my favourite pre 20th-century novel, and I rate the sequel very highly. But there’s one novel of his that I have read, and that is The Massacre of Mankind, an authorised sequel to The War of the Worlds. I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed either. Almost all of what I’ve read of his has been short fiction, in the collection Obelisk and the novella The Medusa Chronicles, co-written with Alastair Reynolds.

Stephen Baxter is an author that I have a mixed history with. Yet even though I first encountered the Morlocks as a child, I hadn’t read Baxter’s authorised sequel until now.

That future of benign but simple Eloi and sinister Morlocks (the twin descendants of modern humanity) is still a favourite story of mine. Wells’ classic story tells of a nameless Time Traveller who takes a quick jaunt to the future to prove a scientific point, and then returns home to tell the tale. It’s the grandfather of time travel stories, and still one of the best. But his second journey to futurity reveals that the future is no set in stone, and any attempt to alter time may have dire consequences. The Time Traveller has returned to his own time, but yearns to visit the future of his beloved Weena once more.

The time ships stephen baxter