The Time Machine is a true classic. Originally published in 1895, H. G. Wells’ short novel of time travel is one of the most beloved works in all of science fiction. Back when I was a twelve-year-old, I vividly recall watching the 1960 film with Mom and Dad at the local movie house. Traveling through time with the turn of the century scientist as he encounters first the Eloi and then the Morlocks proved to be among my most powerful childhood experiences.
As I’m sure was the case with thousands of viewers, after reading the short novel, I discovered the book was actually better than the movie. I just did do a reread and my judgement is confirmed – the book is truly outstanding, worth a read or reread by both those new to science fiction as well as avid fans of the genre. SF Masterworks wisely published the novel as a stand-alone and also combined with the author’s The War of the Worlds.
The tale is told as a frame story, that is, the narrator is one of five guests in the home of a British gentleman referred to as the Time Traveller. One evening the Time Traveller shares his ideas about time and space and then displays a model of a device the size of a small clock he claims can move through time. After the Time Traveller places the finely crafted model on his desk next to his lamp and flips a switch, all the guests are astonished when the little time machine vanishes.
At their next meeting, the guests are taken aback when the Time Traveller enters the room pale, scrapped and his clothes dusty and dirty. He then proceeds to recount his extraordinary experience in the last eight days, an experience mostly focusing on his encounters in the far distant future, in the year 802,701 A.D.
Firstly, next to a large white sphinx, he is surrounded by a band of small, frail, beautiful, graceful people all with curly hair and wearing tunics and sandals. He soon learns they live communally in one buildings and are strict vegetarians eating only a curious futuristic fruit.
Such a future race prompts the Time Traveller (and indirectly the author) to pose a number of philosophic questions: Is this close resemblance of men and women a consequence of there being no need for physical force or to protect themselves from beasts or enemies? Why the sameness in all these people he comes to know as the Eloi (children simply miniatures of adults)? Is individuality a thing of the past? What are the reasons for their lack of curiosity and absence of any written language? What accounts for the apparent dearth of struggle and suffering? Is all what he's seeing the inevitable result of the elimination of class and rank? However, as he acknowledges, his general assumptions about the circumstances of their lives proves to be inaccurate.
But then it happens: he discovers his Time Machine is gone. Who moved it? Where is it now? This is but the first in a series of additional shocks: the Time Traveller recognizes, although they spend their days eating and chatting together, dancing and playing and having casual sex, the Eloi lack any deep feelings for one another. This stark fact is brought home when he watches a helpless woman carried down the river and not one of the Eloi comes to her rescue. Undaunted, the Time Traveller pulls her out of the water. Her name is Weena, and she and the Time Traveller subsequently form an emotional bond.
The most shocking revelation: there is a second race inhabiting this future world, a larger, more ferocious race with white fur and blazing eyes, a race living with their machines under the earth: the Morlocks. Thus the plot quickly thickens. The more the Time Traveller grasps the dynamics of this future world, the more sinister and disturbing. Is all this, he muses, the inevitable outcome of the division of class, the idle aristocrats on one side and the laboring commoners on the other?
His philosophic assumptions about a future society have been shattered. After all, he didn’t bring any provisions with him on his time travel since he assumed future peoples would maintain and expand science and technology thereby furnishing him with any needs he might have for things like medicine or clothing. And to think, he also took it for granted there would be one and only one future race of humans. Who would have guessed the human race would split in two?
With the appearance of the Morlocks, Wells’ tale kicks into one of high adventure. Along the way, the Time Traveller battles the Morlocks with an iron club and that most decisive part of human development: fire. Weena places two white flowers in his trouser pocket, flowers he eventually shows his five guests upon his return to Victorian England, flowers that serve as material evidence his time travel is fact not fiction.
Also worth noting: the Time Traveller reports even more distant future times. One particular account of a race of kangaroo-like brutes that have evolved from future humans was deemed too disturbing and cut by the author’s editors. Yet even without this specific inclusion, what the Time Traveler sees is truly remarkable.
A classic work of science fiction not to be missed.
British author H. G. Wells, 1866 - 1946
“So, as I see it, the Upperworld man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Underworld to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection—absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of an Underworld, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Underworld being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden." - H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
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