The Time Machine: A Sequel

by David Haden, H.G. Wells

This Kindle edition has an active table-of-contents. An 18,000 word novelette, plus a bibliography of scholarly works written about The Time Machine from the 1960s to the present day.

A direct and faithful sequel to Wells's famous and foundational science-fiction story. Read the first chapter free, from the Kindle Store!

58 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 18, 2010

About the author

David Haden is a Lovecraft scholar and lecturer at a British university.

Reviews

[Karen Langford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure what to expect, but this is pretty faithful. A good read if you can take old fashioned Victorian novels. I guess Wells's original "The Time Machine" is a hard sell these days. It's from the 1890s, with a vocabluary to match, and has long expository and intellectual passages. This short sequel (I think just over half the word-length of the original) doesn't shirk from trying the Wells style, but it does nail the old fashioned tone with a little help from Wells's other works. Wells's social themes are not thrown overboard, and the original ideas and characters are developed in interesting ways. There is a lot of description, just as there is in the original - some nice plot twists do get buried in long descriptions, which can be annoying as they flash past. A satisfactory ending, I thought. Along with final chapters of "The Time Ships", this is only one of two sequels the Wells classic that I could recommend.

[PRJ Greenwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and fairly sweet. This author approximates Wells' voice adequately, though he also pays homage to the 2002 Guy Pearce film with an all-knowing virtual librarian. He also integrates the so-called "lost chapter", The Grey Man, into the story.

With this all said, I was acutely aware reading this novella that this was not Wells' work. It's not where he would've taken the story had he been of a mind to craft a sequel, at least I don't think so anyway. He was less interested in the fate of Weena than he was in the fate of humanity, but quite naturally, these sequels by other hands have all made the attempt to rescue her from the fire with varying success.

Does this sequel by another hand succeed? Well, read it for yourself. For a dollar on Amazon you can't go wrong, just don't expect anything stunning or extraordinary in any area.

[Baron · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story abruptly ends just when it's getting interesting. It could have benefited from a longer, more drawn out plot. As it is, it lacks an urgency that the original possessed (i.e. The Time Traveler losing his time machine, the confrontation with the Morlocks, etc.).

But it was all right, and the author did a good job of capturing Wells' Victorian prose. Mostly the problem is is that it's just forgettable.

Of course, the final word in Time Machine sequels is Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, which was a joy to read.