J-Sun
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- Joined
- Oct 23, 2008
- Messages
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I generally like Baxter and hate to start a thread on a negative note but most people seem to love The Time Ships, so I figure it'll quickly turn positive and Baxter's never going to get his forum if people like me tack stuff like this on to the Stephen Baxter anyone? thread like I was originally going to. Of course, this thread may not go anywhere, but it's worth a shot.
I just finished The Time Ships. As a writing exercise, it's very good in capturing a sort of 19th C Wellsian tone but I can't say that makes for the best style otherwise. As a thing for the critics to love, it's full of in-jokes and references such as to "the land ironclads" in "the shape of things to come" and even - switching authors - to "caves of steel". In terms of characterization, it's quite good in delineating a couple of complex, believable characters. Unfortunately, I didn't like the narrator a whole lot and liked the other main character even less. In terms of mind-blowing visualizations and ideas it definitely had a few but, alas, they were scattered through 540 pages of an almost plotless book. Large swathes of this book are or are akin to the the steam-grommet factory which also may be seen as a homage but still doesn't make for a lot of excitement. It starts poorly with about a hundred pages of a single human character and ends poorly with about a hundred pages of a very long drawn-out ending whose last half of ending-ending is anti-climactic. A big chunk of the middle was poor for me in that it goes back into a prehistoric past and, while I'd complain either way, this part of the past didn't even have any dinosaurs. It also displays about the only recurring flaw I've really noticed in Baxter (who I generally like a lot) in that there are hints of things on the periphery of the story that would be much much more interesting than what we're actually witnessing - for instance, the colonization of the moon, solar system, and even the galaxy, while we're sitting around in a room on a ball of ice alone but for one character with his eye stuck in a device - or the device stuck in his ex-eye.
This is also a book that eats quiche in that it hates any hint of militarism and imperialism and loves it some Morlocks. This might be a slightly unfair exaggeration but it's still there and it's kinda weird in context.
Speaking of, while the magic Morlock is, as I said, a well-drawn character, he's also a completely implausibly convenient device for Baxter to repeatedly abuse with his handy near-omniscience.
Despite trying heroically to avoid the nonsensical contradictions intrinsic to the sub-genre, Baxter still seemed to trip a lot, whether caused by time-travel or not. I jotted down almost an entire sheet of contradictions and oddities that aren't important to detail but, like Chinese water torture, made it a lot harder to enjoy the book. They range from talking about the oppressive air of a domed London due to the dome on one page to talking about its freshness due to a lack of cars and such on the next, on to the skull of one of the characters somehow being found in the same timeline in which that character currently resides when his going back to the past should have fractured the timeline right there so that his skull would have ended up in the other branch. Or perhaps not - maybe some of these can be handwaved as I was bothered by at least one seeming contradiction that I was later able to iron out for myself but then that's part of why I don't generally like time travel stories anyway - even if there weren't any problems it would feel like there were and I still have to puzzle over them instead of puzzling over something fun like a spatial/physical problem. Speaking of - a place where space and time (literally) collide: he never explains how a tree can split a time machine, yet the machine never seems to have a problem showing up buried ten feet in the ground or crashing down from ten feet in the air as the height of the ground shifts between jumps - leaving aside how it tracks the earth through its revolutions around the sun's revolutions around the galaxy's revolutions, etc.
Which gets to a critical point where Baxter seems to kind of miss Wells' point. That sort of thing doesn't seem so problematic in Wells because it's all handwavium to support a social treatise. Baxter rigorously details much of the "scientific" aspects of the story which makes problems like that... well, problems.
There are other aspects. For instance, there's the almost complete lack of physical contact or human interactions that would seem to support the serious intent of the Platonic paroxysm in 6.6 "The Triumph of Mind", though the legs are cut out from under it at the start of the next chapter. But it seems that's the less serious part and that this is a genuinely Platonic work in many ways and I hate Plato. But that's just me. Anyway, I didn't like this, though there are several positive aspects.
Massive totally ruinous spoilers:
. Don't hardly seem worth it, do it? 
I just finished The Time Ships. As a writing exercise, it's very good in capturing a sort of 19th C Wellsian tone but I can't say that makes for the best style otherwise. As a thing for the critics to love, it's full of in-jokes and references such as to "the land ironclads" in "the shape of things to come" and even - switching authors - to "caves of steel". In terms of characterization, it's quite good in delineating a couple of complex, believable characters. Unfortunately, I didn't like the narrator a whole lot and liked the other main character even less. In terms of mind-blowing visualizations and ideas it definitely had a few but, alas, they were scattered through 540 pages of an almost plotless book. Large swathes of this book are or are akin to the the steam-grommet factory which also may be seen as a homage but still doesn't make for a lot of excitement. It starts poorly with about a hundred pages of a single human character and ends poorly with about a hundred pages of a very long drawn-out ending whose last half of ending-ending is anti-climactic. A big chunk of the middle was poor for me in that it goes back into a prehistoric past and, while I'd complain either way, this part of the past didn't even have any dinosaurs. It also displays about the only recurring flaw I've really noticed in Baxter (who I generally like a lot) in that there are hints of things on the periphery of the story that would be much much more interesting than what we're actually witnessing - for instance, the colonization of the moon, solar system, and even the galaxy, while we're sitting around in a room on a ball of ice alone but for one character with his eye stuck in a device - or the device stuck in his ex-eye.
This is also a book that eats quiche in that it hates any hint of militarism and imperialism and loves it some Morlocks. This might be a slightly unfair exaggeration but it's still there and it's kinda weird in context.
Speaking of, while the magic Morlock is, as I said, a well-drawn character, he's also a completely implausibly convenient device for Baxter to repeatedly abuse with his handy near-omniscience.
Despite trying heroically to avoid the nonsensical contradictions intrinsic to the sub-genre, Baxter still seemed to trip a lot, whether caused by time-travel or not. I jotted down almost an entire sheet of contradictions and oddities that aren't important to detail but, like Chinese water torture, made it a lot harder to enjoy the book. They range from talking about the oppressive air of a domed London due to the dome on one page to talking about its freshness due to a lack of cars and such on the next, on to the skull of one of the characters somehow being found in the same timeline in which that character currently resides when his going back to the past should have fractured the timeline right there so that his skull would have ended up in the other branch. Or perhaps not - maybe some of these can be handwaved as I was bothered by at least one seeming contradiction that I was later able to iron out for myself but then that's part of why I don't generally like time travel stories anyway - even if there weren't any problems it would feel like there were and I still have to puzzle over them instead of puzzling over something fun like a spatial/physical problem. Speaking of - a place where space and time (literally) collide: he never explains how a tree can split a time machine, yet the machine never seems to have a problem showing up buried ten feet in the ground or crashing down from ten feet in the air as the height of the ground shifts between jumps - leaving aside how it tracks the earth through its revolutions around the sun's revolutions around the galaxy's revolutions, etc.
Which gets to a critical point where Baxter seems to kind of miss Wells' point. That sort of thing doesn't seem so problematic in Wells because it's all handwavium to support a social treatise. Baxter rigorously details much of the "scientific" aspects of the story which makes problems like that... well, problems.
There are other aspects. For instance, there's the almost complete lack of physical contact or human interactions that would seem to support the serious intent of the Platonic paroxysm in 6.6 "The Triumph of Mind", though the legs are cut out from under it at the start of the next chapter. But it seems that's the less serious part and that this is a genuinely Platonic work in many ways and I hate Plato. But that's just me. Anyway, I didn't like this, though there are several positive aspects.
Massive totally ruinous spoilers:
Basically, the 540 page book can be summarized as "he sets out to rescue Weena, goes two steps back for every step forward until, by the way, he masters the secrets of time and space and sees God, but, more importantly, he finally rescues Weena but then gets eaten by a Morlock despite how nice they can be in certain timelines. The end"
