The Time Machine
Title: The Time Machine
Publication Year: 1895
Plot: The story that launched H.G. Wells’s successful career and earned him his reputation as the father of science fiction. With a speculative leap that still fires the imagination, Wells sends his brave explorer to face a future burdened with our greatest hopes...and our darkest fears. A pull of the Time Machine’s lever propels him to the age of a slowly dying Earth. There he discovers two bizarre races—the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks—who not only symbolize the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow as well.
Miscellaneous: The story reflects Wells's own socialist political views, his view on life and abundance, and the contemporary angst about industrial relations. It is also influenced by Ray Lankester's theories about social degeneration and shares many elements with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (1871). It is also thought that Wells' Eloi race shares many features with the works of other English socialists, most notably William Morris and his work News from Nowhere (1890), in which money is depicted as irrelevant and work is merely undertaken as a form of pleasure.
Our group quite like The Time Machine. They were impressed that H. G. Wells pretty much invented the term that we use for any kind of device or vehicle that travels through time. This work was written in 1895. This led one reader to ask, “What would Wells think of our world?” The answers were pretty varied. Obvious things like smart phones, cars, and the internet came up. Would we been seen as lazy? Empire builders? Somewhere in between? It’s interesting to speculate. The time traveler in The Time Machine doesn’t necessarily pass judgement on the future civilzation he visits. But Wells the authors makes some deliberate choices in the world he depicts.
In the future, he writes that “intellect has committed suicide.” That’s a specific choice, suicicide. It wasn’t murdered or otherwise acted upon. It did damage to itself. We talked a lot about the division in the future world. The differences in the Eloi and the Moorlocks as relatives up upper and lower class populations are pointed. We talked about what the classes looked like in Victorian England, and why Wells may have portrayed them as growing further apart after hundreds of thousands of years. Not quite a utopia that other speculative fiction is concerned with.
One thing we noticed: there is only one character that is given a name. Weena is one of the Eloi the narrator saves from drowning. Weena instantly becomes his travel companion and they develop a somewhat affectionate relationship. Why would Wells give this character a name and no other? He describes her as being a “mere human.” We thought it was his way of “humanizing” the future. She gives the traveler the white flowers that remain as the only evidence he visited the future, another act of humanity.
All in all, we really enjoyed this novel. The readers appreciated that Wells did not get bogged down with worldbuilding. This novel could have easily turned into a behemoth, describing multiple facets of the future in detail. But we liked that he focused on the two populations there, as it allowed our conversation to be a bit more focused.
Thanks for following along. Next week, we’ll be discussing The Hobbit. We hope you’re reading something good!
Until then,
E.
If you’d like to read The Time Machine, check out the links below: