The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
The Time Machine
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A Victorian inventor tells his dinner guests that he has been to the year 802,701. He found the human race divided in two: the gentle, idle Eloi in the gardens above and the Morlocks who keep the machinery running below, and it takes him some time to work out which of them is farming the other. He goes further still before he comes back.
About the book
Published in 1895, Wells’s first novel is told at a dinner party: the Time Traveller, who has already shown his guests a working model, returns filthy and limping and describes eight days in the year 802,701. The people he finds there, the Eloi, are small, beautiful, incurious and fed; the machine is gone within an hour of his arrival, and recovering it means going down into the wells where the Morlocks work the machinery that keeps the garden above running. The pastoral turns out to be a stock-farm, and the class arrangement of industrial England turns out to have had four hundred millennia to complete itself. Wells then takes the logic past humanity altogether, to a beach under a swollen red sun — a chapter of pure geological time that has nothing to do with the plot and is the reason the book is still read.
Characters
The Time Traveller — Protagonist
An inventor who demonstrates a model to sceptical guests and then goes eight hundred thousand years out.
Weena — Eloi
One of the Eloi, saved from drowning and attached to him afterwards, and his only company in the future.
The Eloi — Surface dwellers
Small, gentle and incurious inheritors of the earth, living in ruins they cannot repair and do not notice.
The Morlocks — Underground dwellers
Pale machine-tenders who cannot bear daylight and come up at the dark of the moon.
The narrator — Guest
A dinner guest who writes the account down and is left holding the two flowers as evidence.
Filby — Guest
An argumentative red-haired guest, the loudest of those who refuse to believe any of it.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer who trained as a biology teacher under T. H. Huxley, and the scientific romances he wrote in the 1890s supplied science fiction with most of its furniture: the time machine, the alien invasion, the invisible man, the animal made human in a laboratory. He was also a prolific journalist, historian and socialist campaigner who wrote more than a hundred books and expected to be remembered for the arguments rather than the stories. His novels include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds.