The Time Ships - References To The Works of H. G. Wells

References To The Works of H. G. Wells

• The name Gottfried Plattner comes from The Plattner Story (included in Wells's collection of short stories entitled The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, written between 1894 and 1909, first published in 1911). There is no original link between this story and The Time Machine, nor does the account related to us by Baxter at the end of The Time Ships echo an event from The Plattner Story. In Wells's original story, Gottfried Plattner is given a full backstory including ancestry and occupation. He is a school teacher made to chemically analyze a "green powder" of uncertain origin by his students, and, upon lighting the powder on fire, is violently launched into a mysterious parallel dimension next to ours where mute "Watchers of the Living", obviously deceased souls or alternate versions of existing people in our world, take keen interest in us.
• The Morlock Nebogipfel takes his name from Wells' story "The Chronic Argonauts".
• If the name "Nebogipfel" is the compound of a Slavic word nebo for "heaven" or "sky" and the German Gipfel which variously means 'summit', 'pinnacle', 'peak', 'height' or 'crown', then the Morlock's name means "zenith", "crown/apogee of heaven", or "pinnacle of the sky".
• The Time Traveller, Moses and Nebogipfel are taken from 1873 to 1938 in large tank-like vehicle that is capable of time travel referred to as a land Juggernaut which is similar to the vehicles in Wells' short story "The Land Ironclads".
• In the London Dome, the characters are introduced to the Babble Machines, an entertainment/propaganda device, which originally appeared in Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes.
• Wells himself (as "the Writer") is described as giving a lecture on a Babble Machine, and it is mentioned that he may have "a great deal of influence on official thinking on the shape of things to come".
• The dome is somewhat similar in concept to the post world war "Bombproofs" mentioned as existing in London after the second world war in The Shape of Things to Come though this is on a much vaster scale. A similar design is reused by Baxter and Arthur C Clarke in their novel Sunstorm, for the vast dome used to shield London from the Storm of the novels title.
• When the London Dome is breached, the sound of the alarms is described as "ulla, ulla, ulla", which is the cry of the Martian Tripods in The War of the Worlds.
• In the Palaeocene Age, the Time Traveller succumbs to a bacterial infection as his body is ill adapted to the environment, much like the Martians in "The War of the Worlds.
• The people of the Green Moon are referred to as Selenites, as are the inhabitants of the moon in The First Men in the Moon.
• The novel suggests that the universe of the Time Traveller is not ours, but a slightly different one, coherent with Wells novels (whereas Nebogipfel's original timeline created by the publication of the time traveller's first travel in The Time-Machine, according to what he relates of it to the time traveller, appears to be much more similar to ours). Nuclear energy is produced by a material called carolinum and not uranium. Carolinum allows to produce plattnerite relatively easily. Carolinum bombs, contrary to A-bombs, continue to detonate for years with an eerie purple glow. The name carolinum and the continuous detonation are references to The World Set Free.
• In the Palace of Green Porcelain, the Time Traveller views a model of a city resembling London as it is described in When the Sleeper Wakes.
• As the Time Traveller 're-enters' his body following the journey to the Origin of the Universe, much of the description recalls the ending of Under the Knife.