Reviews for Little Book of Cricket

The average rating for Little Book of Cricket based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-08 00:00:00 LARRY NAVARRE [Nebogipfel and the Time Traveller return to the devastated campsite, and over the next year and a half, a handful of maimed surviving soldiers including Hilary Bond start a colony which they call "First London." Nebogipfel insists on repairing the Time-Car although the Time Traveller is irritated by what he sees as a useless waste of time. As one would expect in a good SF story however, shavings of Plattnerite were somehow acquired to power it on a journey through time. The Time Traveller and Nebogipfel travel through fifty million years, seeing "First London" expand and develop colonies on the moon and in Earth's orbit. They also witness extensive human destruction of the Earth's environment, rendering the planet uninhabitable. Eventually they run out of Plattnerite fuel, and wake up to find they are being looked after by a "Universal Constructor", which Nabogipfel has worked out must be a colony of life forms based on nanotechnology. Few stars are left in the night sky, because Dyson Spheres have been constructed around many host stars to provide colonies. None of the beings who have descended from humans are at all recognisable as life forms to either Nabofgipfel or the Time Traveller, being far distant in time from either. The Universal Constructor's goal is to harvest the energy of the sun, using the Plattnerite to build time-travel vehicles to travel to the beginning of the universe. Nebogipfel, who has been partly enhanced with nanotechnology, works out that this goal will take a million years, a time period which does not seem to signify to either him or the Universal Constructor. The Time Traveller however, sees that it is not necessary to wait for a million years. They acquire enough Plattnerite from the Constructors to travel forward a million years in their time machine, to when the Constructors will have finished building their time ships. Once there, reality seems to change, and there is clearly a grand plan with different beings or a consciousness which replaces the Universal Constructor. Although it is unseeable and virtually unknowable, Nebogipfel and the Time Traveller deduce that the new consciousness seems to have more understanding than the Universal Constructor whom it replaces. As a consequence, the Time Traveller and Nebogipfel are relocated to 1871, in the Time Traveller's original history. Gratifyingly, as the reader suspects, the Time Traveller himself had been the mysterious stranger with the Plattnerite sample. Under the alias "Gottfried Plattner", he had given the sample to his younger self. Because of this, the timelines are consistent, and the history which ends up creating the Constructors and their successors proceeds. Nebogipfel, always eager for knowledge and new experiences, leaves the Time Traveller behind to travel with the successors of the Constructors. But the story would not satisfy unless it concluded with an attempt to save Weena. The Time Traveller makes one final journey forward to a slightly earlier point in 802,701, and in a very exciting episode just manages to save Weena from the death she suffered before. But since the timeline must not be changed again, the Time Traveller has to destroy the machine. He stays with the Eloi, encouraging them to learn how to farm and to gradually reduce their dependence on the Morlocks for food and clothing, so that they will one day be separate. The Time Traveller writes an account of his adventures sealing it within some Plattnerite, in the hope that it would be found at some point in the future. He finally records that he plans to go into the world of the Morlocks again, so that he could add an appendix to the story. The last sentence of the novel says that no appendix was found. (hide spoiler)]

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-01 00:00:00 Dean CAmpling Taking on the task of writing a sequel to H.G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine must have been like painting a target on his back. Having read Baxter’s Xeelee Omnibus I was very curious if Baxter can pull it off as the Xeelee books are very hard sci-fi with some very complicated scientific expositions (half of which went well over my head). His prose style in those books is readable but not so high on literary merit. In contrast The Time Machine is a beautifully written and fairly straight forward sci-fi adventure. Baxter’s The Time Ships does seem to be quite popular among his books so I was intrigued to find out how he managed to make a success of it. The Time Ships continues directly from the end of The Time Machine where the unnamed protagonist has recently returned to 1891 from his adventures in the far future where he battled Morlocks, witnessed the end of the world, almost get eaten by weird giant crabtrocities etc. After a few days home it occurs to him to go back to the future to rescue Weena, the little Eloi girl who befriended him and was carried off by Morlocks for her troubles. This is the initial premise to the start of a truly epic adventure in time and space in both past and future directions this time. One missed opportunity about Wells’ The Time Machine is that the “timey wimey” paradox is not featured in the book, the story feels kind of linear in spite of the journey to the future and the return journey at the end. The science fiction genre, which Wells has helped to give birth to, has developed very far since Wells’ time, and Baxter has taken full advantage of that subsequent development. It is as if Baxter has turbo charged the original book, or - perhaps more accurately - strapped a FTL drive to it. From the Edwardian settings Baxter goes on to incorporate post-humanism, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, parallel universes, space elevators and many other modern sci-fi concepts. The Time Ships does not read like a sequel that Wells may have written it himself. It reads more like fan fiction written by a scientist and eminent sci-fi author. Fortunately this time Baxter’s science (mostly) did not go over my head, I certainly find The Time Ships more accessible than his Xeelee books. The plot is completely unpredictable and the occasional illustrations are wonderful, there is even a great anti-war message. Baxter also makes the time machine itself more believable: “Well, then, this is the essence of my Time Machine,’ I concluded. ‘The machine twists Space and Time around itself, thus mutating Time into a Spatial Dimension – and then one may proceed, into past or future, as easy as riding a bicycle!” “We cannot help but interact with History, you and I. With every breath we take, every tree you cut down, every animal we kill, we create a new world in the Multiplicity of Worlds. That is all. It is unavoidable.” Nicely put! Stephen Baxter’s faux-Wellsian prose is a valiant effort though he does not really have Wells’ finesse with the language. He certain overuses exclamation marks in his narratives and dialogue, a habit which I find quite jarring. He did quite well with the character development though, at least with the two central character, the Time Traveler and his Morlock friend Nebogipfel (no, I won’t elaborate on the “Morlock friend” part). The Time Traveller seems to be more badass and pugnacious than I remember from the Wells book. Baxter has the advantage of modern science knowledge which he applied cleverly to the story. In spite of some stylistic flaws I would rate this book at 5 stars because I had 5 stars worth of entertainment out of it. By far the best Stephen Baxter book I ever read and it has made me a regular customer of his.