Similarities
Two slim paperbacks about time travel.
In this edition, the text of The Time Machine fills just ninety six pages and "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" (twenty one pages) is also included, presumably just to lengthen the volume slightly.
Differences
The Time Machine is a pre-genre literary classic and a one-off story concerning only the single Time Machine and its inventor. It speculatively extrapolates only the future progress and decline of mankind on Earth.
Guardians Of Time, a series about an organization, is genre sf, able to draw on a common set of assumptions about future faster than light space travel and interstellar civilizations.
As I often wind up saying: read and value both.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Wells' THE TIME MACHINE was a pioneer and trailblazer, but my view is that Anderson's Time Patrol stories were more fun to read and better written than Wells' work. That is not necessarily a criticism of THE TIME MACHINE, because Wells could only BEGIN that sub-genre of SF, other writers would have to develop and extrapolate from what Wells had started.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that you are missing the literary quality of the writing in THE TIME MACHINE.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Probably! I must have read THE TIME MACHINE two or three times, and I still found it rather heavy and ponderous reading. Rudyard Kipling was writing at the same time as Wells and I've found many of his stories more fun to read (both short and longer works). It comes down to it being a matter of taste, I suppose.
AD astra! Sean
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