Book Review: The Time Ships

Stephen Baxter
1995
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Time Ships is a sequel to H.G. Wells’ classic 1895 novella The Time Machine. It was officially supported by Wells’ estate and was published on the 100th anniversary of the original book. 

Baxter does a brilliant job of staying true to the tone, style, language, and setting of The Time Machine. But he also does a great deal more development of the main character, and uses Wells’ original concept as a jumping-off point to explore monumentally larger questions.

The Time Ships is narrated by the same (unnamed) main character and begins in the same base time (1891) and place (Richmond, England) as Wells’ original story, shortly after the narrator returned home from 802,701 A.D. and related his adventures to his friends. Except, in The Time Ships, the narrator feels so guilty for leaving his Eloi girlfriend and escaping back to Victorian England as she was about to be captured by Morlocks, that he resolves to go back (to the future) to rescue her. So he gets into his machine, sets his control levers, and starts to see the years go rolling by as they did before…

…but, as he travels, he realizes that the future has changed drastically from what he saw on his first trip.

The first thing he notices is that, several millennia in, the sun stops oscillating. In other words, the earth no longer has a tilted axis, but is now straight up and down, with its axis perpendicular to the sun. And then the sun stops moving, staying constantly in the same place in the sky. In other words, the face of the earth he is on is permanently facing the sun. The vegetation and the River Thames dry up and wither away, and the land becomes a blazing desert. And then finally the sun appears to explode and go out entirely! 

Appalled, he brakes the machine, stopping about 600,000 years into his future.

He finds Morlocks around, on this permanently dark Earth. But they are not the Morlocks he met before; these are a highly advanced, peaceful race, who have learned how to harness the sun’s energy by enclosing it in a Dyson sphere to provide everything they need at no cost. They have no want, hunger, poverty, or war. Their lives are lived on a completely rational basis, with the highest purpose being the quest for knowledge. 

His main guide in this world ends up being a Morlock named Nebogipfel, a specialist in physics and youth education. It is Nebogipfel who explains why our narrator didn’t return to the same future as before. Based on the Morlock’s studies of Kurt Gödel in the 1950s, he theorizes that the narrator caused a divergence in history by telling his friends about his adventures when he returned to his own time. Time is full of multiple possible paths, Nebogipfel says, and the narrator’s revelation of the success of his machine led to the branching off of a different timeline from the one he had been living in originally; a timeline in which time travel was now a possibility. By inventing the time machine, the main character changed the future irrevocably.

The narrator is treated with respect and patience by his guide. And as he explores the Earth the Morlocks have made, he comes to have increasing respect for their achievements and their intelligence. But he is still unable to overcome his disgust with not only what they have done with the Earth and the sun, but also their physical appearance. And he wants to go home and fix history. 
So, eventually, he is able to trick Nebogipfel into taking him back to see his time machine, whereupon he jumps inside and sets the controls back for Victorian England. But Nebogipfel jumps in after him just before he takes off, and is carried along back with him.

The narrator has set the controls to 1873, with the idea of going back to his laboratory and convincing his younger self not to build the time machine in the first place. The narrator and Nebogipfel get to his house in 1873, hook up with his younger self, and explain their problem. But all three of them are then kidnapped by time-traveling British Army personnel from 1938, an era of perpetual war with Germany in which time travel is the ultimate weapon. Their mission is to prevent anyone—including the narrator himself—from preventing him from inventing it.

What follows is a twisting, turning adventure through time, as both instantiations of the main character and Nebogipfel travel back and forth from 1938 to the Paleocene Era to 50 million years into the future to the very beginning of time, trying to find a way home.

It is a captivating story. First of all, Baxter does a fantastic job writing from the point of view of a Wellsian, Victorian-era Englishman. The narrator’s archaic turns of phrase, his capitalization of Important Nouns, and his mental explanations of incredibly futuristic concepts in terms of the limited technology that an 1890s scientist would understand, all ring true. And his sensibilities are always being shocked by the things he encounters, particularly those that involve the human body: Morlock flesh, hair, and reproductive methods; 20th-century sexual mores; nanosurgery.Baxter also does a nice job of subtle, steady character development. In his adventures in The Time Ships, the narrator sees atomic bombs and the devastation of war, but he also sees love, community building, and inventiveness. Through one disaster after another, the narrator comes to see first-hand just how evil and, at the same time, just how compassionate and far-seeing humans can be. And he has to learn how to reconcile it all into a far more complex concept of the nature of humanity than he had before.

And, in spite of his initial (and often continuing) physical repulsion of Morlocks, the narrator gradually develops a deep relationship with Nebogipfel. It is a relationship of siblings, rather than friends, in the way they grow to care for and depend on each other, but also fight about so many things. In spite of the narrator's haughtiness, it is from Nebogipfel that he learns the biggest lessons about being comfortable with one's place in the universe.

The story itself was tight enough to keep me reading, and at the same time covered an incredibly ambitious amount of ground. Somehow Baxter was able to weave together a coherent, well-paced story that included prehistoric Earth, space elevators, climate destruction, an alternate-history world war in Europe, quantum physics, and Lovecraftian pyramidal space creatures, in addition to the aforementioned Dyson sphere. It was a little bit like reading a book that combined the writing not only of H.G. Wells, but also Connie Willis, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman, Piers Anthony, and Michael Bishop.

It sounds chaotic, but it worked. Amazingly enough, in what at first seemed like it was going to be just a time-travel adventure, Baxter has written a story of enormous sweep and complexity of understanding. On the one hand, the narrator came face to face with the size of the universe and realized exactly how infinitesimally small he is. And, on the other hand, he saw the currents connecting him both to the past and the future, and how little changes by one person could result in huge changes over a large enough scale of time. And he came through all of this with an understanding of how important it is to continue to strive to improve life for himself and those around him, no matter how small the incremental change might seem.

Book Review: The Fountains of Paradise

Arthur C. Clarke
1979
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This novel is not one of Clarke’s best, but I enjoyed it anyway.

The book follows several intertwining, somewhat-related plot lines which seem a little bit artificially mashed together. As usual with Clarke, though, the science in it is realistic and impeccable. And the last half of the book, which focuses almost completely on only one of the plots, is pretty exciting.

The main story takes place in 2069. Humans have established colonies on the moon and several other planets in our solar system. Vannevar Morgan, an engineer who has become world-famous for building a bridge across the Straights of Gibraltar, now wants to build a space elevator. This would essentially be an incredibly tall tower extending from a point on Earth’s equator all the way up through the ionosphere to a space station in geosynchronous orbit. Goods could be brought up and down the elevator using relatively cheap electricity, and ships could shuttle those goods between the space station and other planets without having to waste energy getting in and out of Earth’s atmosphere.

Morgan needs to build the earth-bound terminal station of the elevator (a) in the area of greatest gravitational stability and (b) at an elevation high enough to avoid hurricanes. The best place is one particular mountain on the fictional island of Taprobane (which Clarke has modeled after Sri Lanka) in the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, the location is already occupied by a 2,000-year-old Buddhist monastery and the monks are reluctant to leave, to say the least.

Interwoven with this modern story is the story of the corrupt and ruthless king Kalidasa who ruled Taprobane 2,000 years ago. He built an enormous pleasure palace, including elaborate fountains kept filled by water-carrying slaves, next to the same Buddhist monastery, and his disruptive presence and decadent lifestyle led to similar quarrels with the monks.

Another parallel story is that of Starglider, an interstellar probe built by aliens on a planet 52 light years away, which passes through our solar system in the early 21st century. Starglider is definitive proof that we are not alone and forever changes our understanding of our place in the universe.

Debates about God and religion come up throughout the book. There is constant tension between those who feel that you should not challenge the gods (usually represented by the monks) and those who appear to challenge them (represented primarily by Morgan, Kalidasa, and Starglider).

The God debate holds promise and the separate plots are interesting in themselves. The space elevator is particularly tantalizing because it could, in fact, be built today, if we put our minds to it (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s exploration of the idea in his Mars trilogy). Unfortunately, together, the different story lines make for a little bit of a disconcerting jumble. And the messages Clarke seems to want to send us about challenging God (if, in fact, that is what we are doing) are muddled; there are sympathetic and unsympathetic characters on both sides.

I did, of course, appreciate Clarke’s reference to R. Gabor’s Pharmacological Basis of Religion, published in 2069 by Miskatonic University Press.

One technical note: If you’re getting this book used or from the library, avoid the 1979 hardcover edition as it has a few erroneously transposed paragraphs in key places towards the end.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Blue Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1996
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT (For Red Mars and Green Mars) 

This is the third book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about the colonization of Mars. It is, on the whole, not quite as awesome as the first two books in the set, but it has its own strengths.

After the more than one hundred years of construction, terraformation, feuds, sabotage, and war that were described in Red Mars and Green Mars, Blue Mars rewards the colonists’ perseverance (and yours) with a Mars that is now warm enough that its ice is melting and forming oceans. Plants and animals are rapidly adapting to the Martian environment. And, at sea level, humans can breathe the air without special equipment.

The people of Mars have turned the planet into a habitable world and have created a unique system of government with which to manage themselves. They actually are now doing much better than the people of Earth, who are dealing with environmental catastrophes and political chaos.

Robinson is an absolute master of the super-hard science fiction that makes up his Mars trilogy. He describes in minute, realistic detail what the colonization and terraforming of Mars could be like, and at the same time understands the emotional reactions the colonists might have to their situation. There are two themes in Blue Mars that particularly show how wise Robinson is about what people would feel at this point in their progress.

One is the colonists’ need to have some ritual way of looking back and celebrating what they have accomplished. All three of Robinson’s Mars books explore the complicated tensions between “greens,” who want to change Mars to make it habitable for humans, and “reds,” who want to keep Mars as it originally was. Obviously, by the time of Blue Mars, the greens have won. But the reds get a victory of a sort when everyone agrees on a set altitude on Olympus Mons above which nothing will be grown or built and the atmosphere will be preserved in its original state. Greens and reds (and everyone in between) begin to use this zone as a remembrance space; once a Martian year, they hike up and build a city of temporary tents like those used by the first colonists and they spend a while there remembering what it was like in the beginning and thinking about the friends who have died along the way.

The other theme I really liked was the effect of super-long lifespans on the minds of the First Hundred colonists. In Blue Mars, fewer than 35 members of the First Hundred survive; the rest have been killed in accidents, murder, and battle. Those remaining have all taken the life-extending treatments invented in Red Mars and are now over two hundred years old.

There are a number of side effects of living this long. For example, as time passes, the original colonists find they have more and more in common with each other and less and less in common with either the newer colonists or the native-born Martians. This makes them tend to draw together, even if they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum or if they originally hated each other.

Another side effect is that even though their brains are perfectly functional, so many things have happened to them that they start to forget or misremember the details of events from a hundred and fifty years ago when they first arrived. Sometimes they say they feel like their early experiences happened to someone else, not themselves. And some of them are unable to keep up with the constant changes that surround them and retreat emotionally, living only in the past.

In general, Blue Mars is a good conclusion to Robinson’s Mars trilogy. There are a couple down sides to it, however. For one thing, it is extremely long, even compared to the first two books. And also much of the last part of the book deals with the expansion of human space colonization into the rest of our solar system, which I found more abstract and less interesting than the original colonization of Mars.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Green Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1993
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
SPOILER ALERT

This is the second installment in Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It is a sequel to Red Mars, the extremely realistic story of the original hundred colonists’ landing and their first few decades of settlement on the red planet. 

In this book, the population of Mars is growing fast. Some of the growth comes from immigration from Earth, as it always has, but much of it now also comes from children born on Mars. The native children tend to be physically different from Earth people – taller and leaner, better at loping around in the lower gravity. 

Martian political conflicts still abound and are even more complicated. Most importantly, since Mars is now run by transnational corporations, there are all kinds of resistance movements across the planet trying to organize a second revolution. 

There is also still a basic tension between the “greens” (who want to terraform Mars) and the “reds” (who want to keep Mars in its original state). The greens are winning by default, having released some unauthorized lichens which have adapted to the atmosphere and have taken off. Since it would be next to impossible to bottle this up again, the reds are getting increasingly hostile and reactionary. 

Robinson tells the story while switching among the points of view of several different people. Sometimes we follow Sax Russell, one of the first hundred colonists and a terraforming proponent. Sometimes we follow Ann Clayborne, another original colonist and one of the most ardent reds. Sometimes it’s Nadia Chernyshevski, a genius at construction who has built many of the power plants and major settlements and only reluctantly gets involved in politics. And sometimes it’s Nirgal, one of the native first-generation Martians. 

This technique is great because after living in the shoes of all these different people, you find yourself being sympathetic to all sides of the political debates. You realize there is no clear-cut easy answer to any question about development. You see why they fight, and you also see how they can actually find common ground and work together sometimes. 

I think my favorite characters are Nadia, who is very practical and realistic, and Sax, who was one of those who originally started the clandestine seeding of the planet but who learns a lot from Ann and goes through a lot of changes of heart over the next hundred years. 

I found the politics less interesting than the biology, however. While all the bureaucratic conflicts are going on, the “greening” of Mars is relentlessly underway. The lichens that the first colonists distributed have started to produce oxygen and are mutating into new varieties. As the book goes on, we begin to see leafy plants and bushes and finally animals – insects, centipedes, and birds. Robinson is so good at this hard, realistic, imaginable SF. I just loved the unpredictable and very, very slow but inexorable transformation of Mars. 

Toward the end of the book there is a catastrophe on Earth when a huge chunk of Antarctic ice breaks off and begins to melt. Sea levels rise, destroying many coastal cities. I had a difficult time watching Earth descend into poverty and chaos while up on Mars people were still able to make and re-make their own societies. It reminded me a little bit of the story in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles where the population of Earth is destroyed in a nuclear war and the only humans left are the lonely colonists on Mars. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Red Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1992
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SPOILER ALERT

Red Mars is super-great, hardest-of-the-hard science fiction.

It is the first book in Robinson’s Mars trilogy and it follows the experiences of the first hundred human colonists on Mars through their difficult first few decades of settlement. It is so practical and so thorough in its details that you can completely imagine it happening in real life. And you can picture yourself there, standing on the frozen, rocky Martian surface with them.

Robinson's “First Hundred” settlers were all carefully selected by their various governments for their technical expertise, diversity of skills, and psychological profiles. They trained together for years in Antarctica in preparation for setting up the first permanent Martian colony. After landing on Mars, they begin building ingenious living quarters, transportation systems, greenhouses, and power plants.

A small group also begins an unauthorized, clandestine effort to introduce Antarctic lichens and other hardy living organisms to the planet to start oxygenating the atmosphere.

Every detail in this book is totally realistic, from the heated pressure suits they have to wear on the surface, to the different types of structures they choose build as homes, to the machines that extract ores and elements from the air and rock.

The colonists’ inevitable arguments and power struggles are equally believable. The longer the First Hundred stay on Mars, the more they separate into the “greens,” who want to terraform Mars to make it livable for humans, and the “reds,” who want to keep Mars as it is.

Meanwhile, as each colonist is trying to create or preserve their own preferred version of Mars, Earth has become dangerously overpopulated and in serious economic trouble. The multinational corporations on Earth who funded the original colonization effort now naturally want to exploit Mars’s resources for Earth’s benefit, and they start sending up more people to do so. Many of the original colonists need the corporations’ support to do their work, but even many of the more Earth-friendly of them are resistant to this complete exploitation.

Corporate representatives eventually build a space elevator to make it easier for ships to make the trip between Earth and Mars. The elevator is a giant cable stretching from a high point on Mars’ equator up through the atmosphere to the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid which has been captured and moved into geosynchronous orbit above the surface station. Passengers and cargo use elevator cars to go up and down the cable between the asteroid and the planet's surface; ships only have to dock at the asteroid and don’t have to burn fuel to get in and out of Martian gravity.

The elevator is great for commerce and immigration. But to many of the First Hundred--especially the "reds"--it symbolizes all that is bad about the direction Mars is going. Eventually, the anti-corporate resistance organizes a revolution, which is unsuccessful and results in the corporations taking over Mars in a military crackdown, but during which they are at least able to bring down the space elevator. The collapse of the elevator is beautiful; it is tremendous slow-motion destruction on a gigantic scale.

To complicate the Earth-Mars conflict still further, a group of doctors on Mars develops treatments which can prolong life by hundreds of years--and they start giving the treatments to their fellow First Hundred colonists. They keep this secret as long as they can, but eventually Earth finds out. This causes chaos on Earth; some politicians want to keep the treatments exclusive, knowing that giving them to everyone would only worsen the population problems, while others say that the treatments are a human right and should be available to everyone for free.

Regardless of what is good for Earth, the age treatments are great for the reader, because they mean that some of the original First Hundred colonists will be able to live long enough to see the fruits of their labors in Robinson’s fantastic later books, Green Mars and Blue Mars.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.