The Time Ships

The Time Ships is a science fiction novel by the British writer Stephen Baxter, published in 1995. It is a sequel to The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, written with the agreement of the Wells estate for the centenary of the original.

The Time Traveller sets out to undo the death of Weena and finds that the future will not hold still for him. He arrives far beyond the year of his first journey, in a period where the sun has dimmed and the world is occupied by a version of the Morlocks who kept their intelligence and built a civilisation of their own. From there the novel widens: a nuclear-armed world, a human colony out on Neptune, and a universe in which the rules of time are being rebuilt around the narrator. Baxter writes the Victorian voice of the original into a hard science fiction framework, so the discoveries are technical as well as dramatic, and the time machine itself becomes a piece of equipment with an explanation behind it.

The novel won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award, and it was written as a continuation rather than a revision of Wells's story.