***Spoiler Alert***
Why not 5 stars? After all, it's certainly an intriguing and, overall, engaging book and, as with Massacre of Mankind, Stephen Baxter has certainly done his research and largely succeeded in taking the premise of The Time Machine onto a new level.
Well, for me it's the fact that, towards the latter stages of the book, Stephen seemed to become a little too obsessed with concepts of Time, Space, Multiplicity, etc., such that whereas the first 350 pages had been about the Time Traveller's adventures in the different universes created by his meddlesome adventures, the following 100 pages (involving the mysterious Universal Constructors) became less of an adventure and more of a science paper as Stephen attempted to put into layman's terms concepts which are difficult to grasp and comprehend. He manages it, but only just, and I have to admit that there were a few pages late on where I skimmed through a lot of the 'sciencey-stuff' to get to what was going to happen next to the Time Traveller.
The Time Traveller storyline, and most importantly his attempts to rescue Weena from the Morlocks, re-asserted itself (thankfully) towards the end and Stephen finished the book with an intriguing cliffhanger of sorts.
All in all, very much worth reading, but just be prepared for a bit of a science-lesson bog three-quarters of the way through.
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