I was so impressed with To Say Nothing of The Dog that I added the three additional books in Connie Willis' Oxford time travel series to my reading list.
When I had finished the four books by Connie Willis I went back to my list. That put the next time travel book as Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein. The less said about that piece of #@^%, the better.
Planning for the end of the month, I looked at the next four or five books on the list. I eliminated Time and Again by Jack Finney. This one is an illustrated novel which doesn't hold up as a mobi file for my Kindle. The next four on the list are Thief of Time by Terry Pratchet,The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter, and The Time Machine by H.G.Wells.The Time Ships was authorized by the H.G. Wells estate in 1995 to mark the centenary of the original publication of The Time Machine.
I last read the H.G. Wells classic in June of 2017, and I wanted to read it again before reading the sequel. I wanted to make sure that those two made it into February, so I bumped them ahead of Thief of Time and The Time Traveler’s Wife.
The Time Machine is truly a classic Sci-fi novella. It is the sine qua non of time travel books. Wells, for what ever reason, did not speculate on the paradoxes of time travel (which is taken care of in Baxter's sequel) but the novel doesn't suffer from that omission.
Wells was a Socialist, and there's a bit of the ol' class struggle in The Time Machine. The Time Traveller stops in 802,701 A.D. and concludes, from what he discovers, that Communism has at last been achieved. Oddly enough, the future looks a bit dystopian coming from a writer who advocated Socialism. In spite of the political slant, I'm giving this book a 4.5 out of 5 stars rating.
According to wikipedia several sequels have appeared over the years. The Time Ships is the only authorized sequel, so I'm not sure if I'll be adding others to my already substantial list.
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