Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Time Ships | 1995 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 2 | Reality Dust | 2000 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 3 | The Light of Other Days | 2000 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 4 | Omegatropic | 2001 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 5 | The H-Bomb Girl | 2007 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 6 | Cilia-of-Gold | 2007 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 7 | The Massacre of Mankind | 2017 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 8 | Galaxias | 2021 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 9 | The Thousand Earths | 2022 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 10 | Creation Node | 2024 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 11 | Fortress Sol | 2024 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
| 12 | Hearthspace | 2025 | Stephen Baxter | Buy |
The Time Ships won the British Science Fiction Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and remains probably the most widely read of Baxter’s standalone books. It captures Wells’s voice while bringing modern physics to bear on time travel, and it works both as pastiche and as a genuinely ambitious science fiction novel in its own right.
The Massacre of Mankind, published in 2017, revisited Wells again with an authorized sequel to The War of the Worlds, imagining a second Martian invasion in the 1920s. Baxter writes these Wells sequels with evident affection for the source material rather than attempting to deconstruct or subvert it.
His other standalone novels range across his characteristic themes. Galaxias deals with a solar system-wide event that turns out to be a message, and working out what the message means and who sent it drives the book. Moonseed, sometimes grouped with the NASA Trilogy, fits just as well here.