When I finished Thunder Below, I realized that I haven't read a Sci-Fi title in a long time and picked up a book co-authored by Ben Bova.  It stunk.  I didn't get more than 100 pages in and dropped it.  I was afraid that since I have read a great many good books with relevance lately, that I was tainted to the irrelevant, namely fiction.   I was wrong.

The Time Ships is a sequel of sorts.  It picks up from The Time Machine, the master work by H.G. Wells.  We follow the further adventures of the Time Traveler as he attempt to return to the time of the Eloi and Morlocks.  But he discovers that time streams are not linear and he cannot return to the future as returning to the past has obliterated that possible future.  Instead he meets a Morlock who is civilized and vastly intelligent, far removed from the Morlocks of Wells imagining.  The remainder of the story involves the Time Traveler's futile attempts to find his place in the Multiplicity, or the whole of possible past and futures.

The main praise I have for this book is this:  Finally someone treats time travel in a way that is not insulting to anyone who knows the least bit of theoretical physics or cosmology.  I really enjoyed this book and will use it as a stepping stone to more of Baxter's works.  Well done, excellently planned and brilliantly executed.  A fine read.