book review of the time machine

Lucy A. Snyder

Author • editor • writing instructor, book review: the time machine by h.g. wells.

November 4, 2005 Lucy A. Snyder book review , Uncategorized 2

Plot Summary (Spoilers Inevitably Follow)

H.G. Wells ‘ novel opens with the Time Traveler explaining his plans to travel in time to a group of his Victorian peers (most only named by an occupational label.) The next scene is a dinner party a week later with the narrator and a few of the Time Traveler’s previous guests. The Time Traveler enters the room in terrible shape. After he has cleaned up and has eaten, he begins to tell them of his trip in time.

The narratorial voice switches to that of the Traveler himself, and he tells them that he went to the year 802701 A.D. The England of the distant future is a beautiful place, almost a Utopia, but civilization is in majestic ruin. He first encounters the Eloi, a race of pretty, vacuous beings descended from humans. All other animals are apparently extinct, and the vegetarian Eloi have every need mysteriously provided for. Then, he discovers that someone has taken his time machine and he is frantic until he realizes that it has been locked in the bronze base of a nearby statue. He gives up on trying to free his machine, and later saves a drowning Eloi named Weena.

Weena tags along with the Traveler, and he soon discovers the existence of the Morlocks, a race of subterranean creatures descended from the human working class that maintain the underground machines that support the Eloi. He goes off exploring in the countryside with Weena in tow, and in the process of going through a ruined museum he lets the time get away from him and the Morlocks come out to attack after dark. He gets away from them, but inadvertently starts a forest fire and Weena is killed in the chaos.

The Traveler makes it back to the statue and finds that the doors are open. He goes inside to get his machine, and the Morlocks try to trap him. The Traveler manages to escape and goes far into the future to a time where the place he once lived is a beach with monstrous crabs. He travels on to an era near the end of the world, a time of darkness and cold. Then, he returns to his own time.

The only one who seems to believe his story is the narrator. The narrator goes into the lab to talk to the Time Traveller, but he and his machine are gone.

The Time Machine   is a social doom prophecy. The future is presented as a place where the privileged have finally gotten a world where they can lead utterly carefree lives of leisure. Unfortunately, the centuries of soft living have turned the rich into weak and stupid creatures. Meanwhile, the working class has speciated into subterranean horrors that finally seek revenge on their former masters. This is to serve as an extrapolation of what Wells surely saw as a widening gulf between the rich and poor in Victorian England. Wells exaggerated the difference between the Morlocks and Eloi to warn the well-to-do and the British government that the social injustices of the day would prove ruinous if not corrected. Also, Wells warns everybody that the attainment of our ideal world, one with no pressure or work, would probably be fatal to the human race.

The Time Machine seems to compare favorably with mainstream literature of its day. When compared with more modern novels, science fiction or otherwise, parts of it seem a bit quaint and stuffy. Still, Wells was a good writer and the novel has a sense of wonder; it’s a fine adventure tale.

On the surface, the circumstances and science sound good, but they don’t hold up well if you know much about science. I accept the idea of the time machine, since that particular fantasy is central to the story, but there are a few other details that bothered me.

First, the Time Traveller describes the land as being devoid of fungi. The primary decomposers in an ecosystem are fungi; without them, you can’t have a gorgeous landscape. I guess Wells just didn’t want stinkhorns on his world.

Also, the Eloi are described as being disease-free. Perhaps science could get rid of parasites and viruses. But you can’t kill off the bacteria; otherwise, the whole ecosystem goes down. No decomposition, no nitrogen fixation, no plants … no Eloi. Since there must be bacteria, eventually you’ll have disease, since bacteria mutate quickly and will occupy any ecological niche that they can get started in.

The behavior of the Morlocks rang a little false with me. They’re intelligent enough to run the machines and lay a trap. Why didn’t they use weapons while trying to hunt the Time Traveler down? Chimpanzees and even crows use primitive tools. I suppose Wells kept the Morlocks unarmed so that the hero could get away; a party of armed Morlocks could have easily brained him.

Also, I didn’t completely believe the development of the Morlock society. I don’t think a working class, no matter how subjugated, could be kept down for so long. It only takes one extremely able person to get a revolution going, and in the time frame the novel spans I’m sure that the workers would have already rebelled successfully.

I think Wells was accurate in showing the evolutionary changes that could occur in several hundred thousand years’ time. The physical changes to the Eloi were pretty good; I have read other predictions that humans will get more androgynous and possibly smaller if automation progresses at its current pace.

However, I doubt the extent of their mental deterioration. I think that they would have had games and sports, and that would have almost guaranteed that at least some of the Eloi would not have been so small and weak. Humans love games; even in places where there is no literacy and no ambition, you have stickball and basketball and poker. The Eloi still had language, why not at least some balls to throw around?

My criticisms aside, I thought the novel has held up very well. Some of Wells’ scientific reasoning was off, but the knowledge of the day was limited. The story is good and fast-paced, and the descriptions are engaging. The novel lacks the literary ammunition of other works of the same period, but it paved the way for a whole lot of really excellent science fiction stories and novels.

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Book Review: The Time Machine by HG Wells

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Wellss The Time Machine scarcely needs an introduction, so deeply incised is it on our collective social consciousness. Its one of those speculative novels that stands ahead of the crowd for several reasons: its themes of evolution and social class (er, and time travel), its status as one of the early popular works of science fiction, and its readability. And though it didnt quite strike the same readerly chord with me as The Invisible Man ( see my review ), I cant help but admit that Wells is in good form with this novel.

This famous novella is the account of an unnamed narrator, a scientist and futurist, who claims to have returned from a rather long-distance voyage indeedbut by long-distance, I mean, of course, chronologically rather than geographically. The man, it turns out, has 'spent a good deal of time as a time tourist some eight hundred thousand years in the future. And during this time he has had a truly unusual ethnographic encounter: he finds himself living amongst a society of human so far evolved that they are scarcely recognisable. But simple, linear evolution is not all that he encounters. It turns out that our future selves have split into two separately evolving groups, and our unnamed narrator spends his voyage attempting to understand the habitus of each.

Perhaps whats so fascinating about this book is its sense of utter alienation. The fact that the story is that of an unnamed narrator, but is in turn told by a similarly unnamed narrator, already positions the reader in such a way that they feel removed from the situation. Moreover, the narrators sheer inability to become a part of these societies despite his concerted efforts to learn and understand their ways is deeply moving, as is the fact that he struggles to be accepted by his peers, who are disbelieving of his tale to the end.

(While the social aspects of this novel are fairly hard hitting, there also seems to be an interesting commentary on story going on here. The fact that the narrators tale is automatically accepted as apocryphal, and nothing more than mere entertainment, is intriguing enough in itself, particularly given that the narrator positions himself as a man of serious learning (albeit one who jaunts off in a time machine just for the heck of it rather than for any scientific purpose). But language and narrative are also given a subordinate position in the world of the Eloi, the evolved (devolved?) humans with whom the traveller lives. He speaks of their language as simple and lacking abstract concepts, and their interactions seem to carry little information.)

The two future human races are highly specialised (in a not-so-subtle commentary of the hard-workin commoners vs the lazybum elites), with the Eloi a group of languid hedonist gadabouts, and the Morduk their more industrious counterparts doing more than their fair share to keep the world turning. But its a sort of loosely symbiotic relationship, with the Eloi reliant on the industry of the Morduk, and the Morduk cannibalising the Eloi come nighttime. I say loosely, though, as the Eloi live in fear of the Morduk, and are characterised as having been reduced to a sort of infantalism (an interesting trope that recurs through much speculative literature) as a result of their historically failing to pay attention to the sorts of pragmatic stuff generally required to get around in the world. But Wells is not so condemnatory as one might expect: he places judgements on both species, as well as on the modern-day narrator himself (who begins a relationship with one of the Eloi, and is characterised as a rather self-indulgent scientist), and endlessly asks the question of what makes someone human, and is one type, or aspect, of humanity better than another?

Still, perhaps what I personally found most interesting about the novel is its Philip K Dick-esque (okay, I know thats an anachronism) play on reality. The time travellers machine is described in such sketchy terms that it can scarcely be believed as an instrument of science, and the time travellers account is similarly sketchy and bizarre. The very nature of time travel means that hes away for only a short period of time, and the only proof of his travels is a crunched up flower. And given that the narrative is told in a twice-removed manner, the reader cant help but wonder whether any of the novel is true at all. Did the time traveller truly engage in such chronological shenanigans, and did he experience what he claims? Or is he simply using an imagined future to provide a warning about the current state of society? But the reality is that neither the truth, nor the journey matters: its only the outcome.

The Time Machine is the type of book that one could dissect for days, and remains surprisingly relevant today. Those very same questions regarding the role of science, the distribution of work and knowledge, of the origins and definition of humanity, and on notions of class and capitalism echo around us today, making for some interesting, and pertinent discussion.

Purchase The Time Machine from Amazon | Book Depository UK | Book Depository USA

See also our review of The Invisible Man

See also our review of The Island of Dr Moreau

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The time machine, by h g wells, recommendations from our site.

“This is the novel that inaugurated time travel as a sub-genre. Wells picked up the up-to-date (in the 1890s) scientific speculation about time being a fourth dimension, and ran with it, imagining a machine that could take a man backwards and forwards through time….It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it is smoothly and evocatively written, and it manages to open a chink in the reader’s mind that gives a dizzying, thrilling glimpse down the vertiginous perspectives of long time.” Read more...

Science Fiction Classics

Adam Roberts , Novelist

“It invents the idea of far-future visions that science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke have constantly tried to achieve.” Read more...

The Best H G Wells Books

Roger Luckhurst , Literary Scholar

Other books by H G Wells

The first men in the moon by h g wells, anticipations of the reactions of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought by h g wells, the war of the worlds by h g wells, the island of doctor moreau by h g wells, a modern utopia by h g wells, our most recommended books, war and peace by leo tolstoy, on liberty by john stuart mill, middlemarch by george eliot, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, the odyssey by homer and translated by emily wilson, republic by plato.

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Book Review: “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, Illustrated by Alessandro Lecis and Alessandra Panzeri

Ale + Ale’s artistic style is described as a “surreal interpretation of reality” in their back-of-the-book bio. This style is particularly effective for The Time Machine , a story that even the narrator isn’t quite sure truly happened. The illustrations have a steampunk style, which any illustrated Wells book would be lost without. In addition, the artists use a variety of clippings and textures in their art to create a decoupage-like style with a distinctly Victorian feel. But my favorite thing about the illustrations is that they aren’t all literal depictions of what’s happening in each scene. Rather, they feel more like artistic renderings of what the world possibly looks like and don’t force one interpretation onto the reader. They suggest rather than force the reader to envision the world’s features and serve to emphasize the mood of the story more than anything else. They truly are “surreal interpretations” of a reality we readers aren’t even sure is real in the first place.

This edition also makes effective use of typographic features throughout the text. Some pages have only a few words on them, but those words are designed in such a way that emphasizes what’s happening in the story. For example, words are designed in a curve while describing the curve of the moon or scattered across the page like stars as the Time Traveller describes the night sky. Significant phrases are often emphasized this way, adding drama to the already dramatic story.

The text is one of my favorite examples of classic science fiction. H.G. Wells was so ahead of his time that you start to ask yourself if he really had invented a time machine. Ale + Ale’s modern illustrations serve to heighten the out-of-time feeling throughout this edition, which elevated the reading experience for me greatly, even though it is a story I already know well.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher, Rockport Publishers, for review.

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The Time Machine

By h.g. wells.

'The Time Machine' is a science fiction thriller which details the life and story of a brilliant scientist and craftsman whose love for scientific adventure led him to a breakthrough that empowered him to travel far into the future, see humanity at its most trying moments, and beyond, and then back in time to tell his experience to his friends.

About the Book

Article written by Israel Njoku

Degree in M.C.M with focus on Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

‘The Time Machine’ is a science fiction thriller which details the life and story of a brilliant scientist and craftsman whose love for scientific adventure led him to a breakthrough that empowered him to travel far into the future and see humanity at its most trying moments, and beyond, and then back in time to tell his experience to his friends. The story of The Time Machine hits top gear with a breakthrough that enables the time traveller to build a time machine. With this invention, he finds himself, finally, a vehicle within which he can explore time – a concept that has always fascinated him. So he embarks on this trip of a lifetime through time but realizes that the future is nothing like what he had envisaged or hoped for. He struggles to understand how there are so many anomalies in the future. For instance, he finds that man has evolved into two distinct species – the Eloi and Morlocks – and that the latter is literally eating the former up for dinner. He observes that man has given up on technology and is now operating a sort of mono-gender society. Still, he notices a lot of other changes here and there but finds a way to luckily absorb the shock. He tries to get himself attuned to the environment but unlike the peace-loving Eloi race with who he’s been able to bond, a savage race of Morlocks are on his trail, carefully brewing his destruction as well as that of his friends – the Eloi. He discovers that these hostiles have drawn the first blood by stealing and hiding his time machine to trap him long enough to wipe him out. He must get it back and disappear from this godforsaken place with his life in one piece.

Key Facts about  The Time Machine

• Title:  The Time Machine
• When Written: H.G. Wells wrote the book between 1894-1895
• When/Where Written: H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine while in England
• Published : The Time Machine was published in 1895 as a serial novel
• Literary Period : Victorian Period
• Point of View : H.G. Wells deploys a first-person narrator called Hillyer. However, the story is almost entirely told by the time traveller as a first-person account of his trip to the future.
• Genre : Science Fiction, Fantasy, Thriller
• Setting : Victorian-era England in the year 802,701
• Climax : When the time traveller escapes the Morlocks by taking the time machine into the future
• Antagonist : The Morlocks

H.G. Wells and The Time Machine

H.G. Wells literary experiment with time trips and travels may have lapped well in his remarkable book The Time Machine , but it’s of little knowledge to all that the entire concept is an adaptation from ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ – one of the short stories he wrote well into the year 1880s as a college student. Wells likes to be thought of as a strange, unusual bloke even among his contemporaries and he sure as anything reflects that mentality in all his books, particularly with ‘ The Time Machine’ which was in fact his first real book. For Wells, the story of ‘ The Time Machine’ goes beyond being a mere literary aesthetics but also accommodates a gentleman’s warning to the 1890s Victorian English peoples of his generation.

Books Related to The Time Machine

science fiction and the first in the time travel subgenre and reading through the book’s richness, one couldn’t agree more. Although he was one of the earliest people, if not the first, who started experimenting with the concept of time travel as an author of scientific nonreality, his time as a student under T. H. Huxley the great certainly sharpened his mind towards the discipline. Following the popularity and the accompanying standards set by Wells’  time machine, several other authors started putting out fine pieces related to time travel, trips to the future, and through time. Some of the books bearing striking resemblance to ‘ The Time Machine’ in terms of concept and theme include – ‘ Here And Now And Then ‘ by Mike Chen, ‘ Back To You ‘ by Steve Bates, and ‘ Quantum Time (Quantum #3) ‘ by Douglas Phillips, and there is still an endless list.

The Lasting Impact of The Time Machine

After it was published in 1895, Wells’ book ‘ The Time Machine’ became an instant influence on its generation, as it was immediately designated one of the best earliest works of the science fiction genre and the first of its kind in the time travel subgenre. Aside from garnering a handful of accolades, the book became a major talk of society as it was now a trendsetter forcing itself – and the reality of the idea of time travel – into people’s thinking.

Wells is known to instil rich and powerful storylines in his works and one time it appeared to have caused mass unrest as one of his works broadcast on the radio left its audience (who, at the time, didn’t know it was a fictional book) petrified for their lives. Through the years, ‘ The Time Machine’ has proved a sturdy book, beating off criticism from stakeholders both in the science community and from ordinary blokes who think the piece may have been too daring.

The Time Machine Review ⭐

‘The Time Machine’ is one book that offers a lot of enjoyment to the reader. From the richly packed romance between the time traveler and Weena to the unexpected run-ins with a mischievous bunch of evolved humans called Morlocks down to several time trips in an actual time machine. This is one book that is century-plus old but its pages and stories therein are always fresh and exciting when it’s looked up.

The Time Machine Quotes 💬

Quotes are abundant from the book ‘The Time Machine’ which flaunts endless examples of some prominent themes Wells manages to nail within the story.

The Time Machine Themes and Analysis 🕔

H.G. Wells’s book ‘The Time Machine’ cracks open several human social traditions offering among other things, a reasonable perspective on what ruins await humanity if it fails to dissever the practice of social classing.

The Time Machine Historical Context 🕔

In 1894, visionary writer Herbert George Wells authored ‘The Time Machine,’ a pacesetting masterwork on the concept of time travel, which immediately became a game-changer in the science fiction genre, and a complete inspiration to hundreds of later books, comics, and films adaptation.

The Time Machine Character List 🕔

H.G. Wells’ character creation is without a doubt primped to resonate with the storyline of ‘The Time Machine.’

The Time Machine Summary 🕔

‘The Time Machine’ is a fictional novella written by H.G. Wells on the reality of time travel with the account told by the ‘time traveler’ himself to a group of Victorian English folks.

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NERDS LIKE ME

For the bookishly-minded.

REVIEW: The Time Machine – H.G. Wells

Author: H.G. Wells

UK Publisher: Penguin (this edition)

Genre: Science fiction

“I’ve had a most amazing time…” So begins the Time Traveller’s astonishing firsthand account of his journey eight hundred thousand years beyond his own era – and the story that launched H.G. Wells’ successful career. 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 symbolise the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of tomorrow as well.

A few years back, I went on a bit of a spree trying to read literature that would “improve” me. This meant trying to batter my way through a lot of classics. It took a lot of work, but I finally made it through Emma . Lorna Doone was tackled on a kindle while driving across Canada. I read the Great Gatsby in one sitting on the plane back to the UK. I really enjoyed Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , and I stumbled across The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells and thought it was wonderfully chilling. I never got around to reading The Time Machine , however, and given as lockdown has presented me with a lot more reading time than anticipated, I thought I’d seize the opportunity.

I had been pleasantly surprised by how easy The Island of Dr Moreau was to read, and at a mere 91 pages, I thought this would be a similarly easy undertaking. I was, sadly, incorrect. Where Dr Moreau was eldritch and unsettling, The Time Machine opens with a dense discussion of Victorian science and dimensional physics. It was definitely a bit of Wells flexing his scientific understanding to show off. I found it quite tricky to get through, although ironically this was my husband’s favourite part of the book and he said he felt it went downhill afterwards when the actual time travelling started.

The narrative is almost like a nature documentary, with the Time Traveller set apart from the other figures in the story as a sort of unbiased observer and impartial scientific voice. Except he’s anything but impartial, he’s judgy as heck. He describes the Eloi as beautiful, but as soon as he finds their societal values and methods different from his, he describes them as childlike, simple, and utterly useless. He seems charmed by their appearance, but otherwise mourns the loss of intellect and production. He treats them as pets, and the one he does “adopt” – Weena – he seems to care for only as long as it is convenient to do so, and he doesn’t take her comfort or safety into account. He only starts to see the Eloi as something more worthwhile when he encounters the Morlocks, but he doesn’t make much of an attempt to confirm his biases towards the Morlocks either.

At some points, the novel seems to trend towards being dangerously socialist. The Time Traveller talks about how the idle lifestyle of the wealthy and aristocratic has led to a race of beautiful idiots, incapable of any productive labour or higher thought. He talks of how the wealthy hoarding land and wealth pushes the working classes into a shrinking area of resources and space. He talks about how the poor are forced into constant industry, into the dark and literally underground. But then it progresses into these people lose civilisation, lose morals, and eventually become cannibalistic monsters. But while he seems to think this stratification of society is bad, he never empathises with the Morlocks in the same way he does with the Eloi.

He spends a bit of time going on about how the Eloi are the result of humanity no longer needing to struggle. Humans, he posits, are at their greatest when they are having to strive against something, to achieve something. When there is no longer need for struggle, then humanity will atrophy and become useless. What this overlooks is that there never ceased to be a need for struggle or work, it was just entirely forced upon another class of society. Funny how, after mourning the loss of mankind’s greatness due to lack of work when examining the Eloi, he doesn’t equally look at the Morlocks and start praising them for their noble industriousness. In fact, right from his first encounter with them he assumes they have nefarious intent based entirely on their appearance. He doesn’t try to investigate, he doesn’t try to explore their culture, he makes unconfirmed assumptions and then decides to run with them. At no point, either, does this philosopher and scientist show the slightest bit of self awareness on the hypocrisy of his assumptions and reactions. While he does identify times where he was wrong – such as the idea that there is no industry on future Earth, or nothing to cause fear – he doesn’t have the humility to go “I know I said humans were better then they had to deal with adversity, but I mean rich humans, and only a little adversity. The kind that doesn’t make you sweaty or too hungry.”

The last part of the novel is almost a different book as he shoots himself a thousand thousand years further into the future from where he was (which was already around 800,000 years on from where the book started), and finds himself on a dead Earth. Nearly dead. The planet has ceased to spin, the sun has grown larger and cooler, and half the world is an arid wasteland bathed in red light. One stop brings him to a beach filled with giant, crab-like creatures, the next to a world empty for all apparent life save a black, ball-like entity floating in the sea. These scenes are more tonally like Dr Moreau , that unsettling feeling of something very far from human, and I liked them a lot, but they felt a little pointless in terms of the greater narrative. They were plotless snapshots, and another chance for Wells to show off what he had perhaps learned about the lifecycle of stars and planets.

I’m glad I read it, and can add it to my list, but it isn’t the Wells I’d recommend to anyone who wanted to pick up his work for the first time.

• A surprisingly dense piece for such a short book, it is more of an exploration of the philosophy of human nature with a bit of Victorian Science thrown in for flavour than it is an adventure story.
• There are definitely some outdated views here, mostly in the complete lack of awareness of the narrator’s hypocrisy, lamenting that humans have become useless through lack of industry, but then being horrified at the creatures formed by the humans who were forced to take on all the industry.
• If you want to tick Wells as an author off your list, I’d recommend The Island of Dr Moreau instead.

Rating: 2/5 – it was interesting seeing the science that would have been fairly modern at the time being used for fiction, in the way we extrapolate today, but otherwise I think it’s a book that hasn’t necessarily aged well.

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My husband adores this book, it is actually one of his favourites!

Love, Amie ❤ The Curvaceous Vegan

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I’m glad he enjoys it! I think there are some books which just really click with some people. 🙂

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The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – Book Review

Published 09/06/2017 · Updated 24/05/2022

The Time Machine

Author – H.G. Wells Publisher – Alma Classics Pages – 160 Release Date – 23rd March 2017 ISBN-13 – 978-1847496270 Format – paperback Reviewer – Clive I received a free copy of this book Post Contains Affiliate Links

A Victorian scientist and inventor creates a machine for propelling himself through time, and voyages to the year AD 802701, where he discovers a race of humanoids called the Eloi.

Their gently indolent way of life, set in a decaying city scape, leads the scientist to believe that they are the remnants of a once great civilization. He is forced to revise this assessment when he comes across the cave dwellings of threatening apelike creatures known as Morlocks, whose dark underground world he must explore to discover the terrible secrets of this fractured society, and the means of getting back to his own time.

A biting critique of class and social equality as well as an innovative and much imitated piece of science fiction which introduced the idea of time travel into the popular consciousness, The Time Machine is a profound and extraordinarily prescient novel.

The Time Machine was H.G. Wells’ first published novel and it was a development of his previous story The Chronic Argonauts which was first aired in the Science School Journal that he edited as an undergraduate. To me the writing lacked the colourful grammar and language of his later works and at 107 pages it is definitely on the brief side.

At the time H.G. was fascinated by anything scientific and by socialist politics; this storyline gave him an opportunity to include his comments on both.

Since then there have been countless works about time travel but at the time the concept was quite novel. To modern readers his design of a time machine seems rather ridiculous with the traveller seated in the open, exposed to the weather and other physical danger. The science behind it is very weak but as no one has since managed to find a way to travel through time who can say whether he was right or wrong.

The Time Machine gave me a pleasurable read and if you have not yet read The Time Traveller you should take advantage of this Alma Classic publication to do so. I have awarded three stars.

Book reviewed by Clive

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Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometime shopkeeper, his mother a former lady’s maid. Although “Bertie” left school at fourteen to become a draper’s apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893.

In 1895, his immediately successful novel rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher’s salary. His other “scientific romances” – The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908) – won him distinction as the father of science fiction.

Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase “the war that will end war” to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: “Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me.”

Tags: Alma Books Amazon Author Book Book Blog Book Blogger Book Review Book Reviewer Classic Clive Fiction H.G Wells Paperback Review Three Stars

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The narrator introduces an eccentric scientist whom he refers to as the Time Traveler. After lunch one afternoon at the Time Traveler’s home, he and his colleagues discuss the theory of time being considered as a fourth dimension. By considering this, the Time Traveler explains that, much like how matter can move through space, it could also move through time. His colleagues either laugh or show skepticism. Determined to prove his colleagues wrong, the Time Traveler uses all his efforts and resources to build his time machine.

About a week later, the narrator returns to the time traveler’s home, where they see several people who work for the local newspaper. as they are waiting, their host arrives, looking the worse for wear. after eating a large meal (as if he hadn’t eaten in days), he escorts his guests to the smoking room where he tells of his adventure as the first man to travel through time. he relates how he successfully traveled to the year 802,701., there he found perfect, but simple-minded humans, eloi, who live in large palaces. the eloi were terrorized by a group of monstrous beings, morlocks, who live underground. when the time traveler’s time machine disappears, he frantically searches for it and is forced to unravel more details about this mysterious culture, and how human civilization came to this point. the more he discovers about this supposed utopia, the more he realizes that he has come to a very dark time and wonders if he will survive long enough to make it back home., h. g. wells is among one of the most notable classic sci-fi writers. the time machine is well’s claim to fame, and for good reason. the story went on to inspire three movies, several spin offs, tv shows, comic books, and indirectly inspired many sci-fi stories. even though it may classify as a short story, the time machine is every bit an exciting tale of adventure into the great unknown that will demand your attention and leave you pondering many deep questions. it is also very enjoyable to see how far the science fiction genre has evolved after more than 100 years., i would describe the time traveler as a pessimist. as he explores the future human civilization, he often describes his disappointment. the future is not as he had hoped it would be, and he is quick to assume the worst when analyzing the possibilities of how society came to be this way. the narrator, however, is a sharp contrast; he is optimistic when he hears the journey through time and is inspired by the prospect that human qualities, such as gratitude and mutual tenderness, are still very strong. this discovery, in his eyes, is what makes life worth living. i believe that it’s because of this contrast that the author purposefully left the story open-ended. the reader is free to interpret the future with either appreciation or animosity., if you enjoy stories that have you ponder philosophical questions, leave you in suspense, and give you the option to interpret them however you please, this is an excellent book to read., [amazon text=buy it on amazon&template=carousel&asin=0486284727], the bottom line, jennifer hicklin, leave a comment cancel reply.

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Book Review: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles.

With some time to kill over Christmas I wanted to read something small. My eye fell on this little thing and I sort of liked reading it. But there were much better reads this year.

Title & Author: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells Genre: Science-Fiction, Adventure Release Date: May 7 1895 Series: Standalone Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Synopsis “I’ve had a most amazing time….” So begins the Time Traveller’s astonishing firsthand account of his journey 800,000 years beyond his own era—and 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.

I give The Time Machine by H.G. Wells three out of five stars. This not because the story is not interesting, but because the way the story has been written made me confused on who was actually the main character. Of course it has to be The Time Traveller, but it is told as if that person tells the story to our main character. Each time I picked the book back up and they went back to the room where the story is told, it confused me. Because both parts are written in the I perspective.

I would expect The Time Traveller to be a smart person, but he sometimes lacked a normal comprehension of the world and evolution of the human race.

The different creatures The Time Traveller meets are pretty interesting and original, but it was not something that kept me on reading this book.

The novel is worth being called a classic, but I would not read it again now that I have. I do like the end of the novel.

Let me know what you thought of this book! If you have any requests for which book I should talk about next, please let me know in the comments down below.

For now, let books enrich your life!

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The Time Machine

H. g. wells, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Time Machine is a work of science-fiction that imagines how the social conditions of Victorian England have evolved in the year 802,701. The story opens on a dinner party at the home of an eminent scientist, the Time Traveller , who is explaining to his assembled guests (including the narrator telling the story) principles of science and math that support the possibility of traveling across time, just as one would travel across space. His guests are upper class British men—a doctor, a psychologist, a journalist, etc.—and they greet his pronouncements with skepticism.

To demonstrate the validity of his ideas, the Time Traveller brings into the living room a small model of a machine. The psychologist, ever skeptical, depresses a lever and the machine disappears. The Time Traveller then reveals that he has almost completed a life-sized machine that will transport him through time. He shows the machine to the guests, but they remain skeptical.

At dinner the following week, the Time Traveller is not there to greet his guests. He has left a note instructing them to proceed with dinner if he is late, and partway through their dinner the Time Traveller staggers into the house looking disheveled and injured. Once the Time Traveller has washed up, he agrees to tell his story in full on the condition that nobody argues with him or asks questions, since he is terribly exhausted.

The Time Traveller says that the previous week he finished his machine and took a voyage into the future. He arrived in the year 802,701 on the spot where his laboratory once stood—it had become a garden of strange flowers beside a large white Sphinx statue. He saw small humanlike beings (whom Wells later reveals are called the Eloi ), and they seemed feeble and much less intelligent than he hoped the people of the future would be.

The Time Traveller continues his tale: the beings are friendly to him, and he begins to explore the landscape for clues to what has happened. There seems to be no adversity, fear, or labor in this world, and the Time Traveller hypothesizes that this is a communist utopia of the future, in which all social problems have been solved. He believes that this explains the weakness and stupidity of the beings—there is no need for force or intelligence in a world of peace and plenty. The Time Traveller is briefly delighted, but, despite thinking that all problems are solved, he still feels disappointed that future humans are not smarter or more curious.

When the Time Traveller returns to the garden where he landed he realizes that his time machine is gone. He briefly goes into a rage-fueled panic, and then decides that the rational course of action is to study this new world, learn its ways, and let this knowledge lead him back to the time machine. Seeing grooves in the grass leads him to believe that the machine has been hidden behind a metal panel in the pedestal of the Sphinx statue, but it won’t give when he tries to open it.

The Time Traveller begins learning the language of the Eloi (which is very simple) and he explores the landscape, noticing a strange network of dry wells and towers, which suggests a large underground ventilation system. He also notices that the Eloi never seem to do any work, but their sandals look new and their clothes are not frayed. This observation, combined with his having felt something touching him at night and having caught a glimpse of a strange white animal, leads him to determine that his original utopian explanation is inadequate. Later that day he rescues a drowning Eloi. Her name is Weena , and she begins giving him flowers and following him everywhere to express her gratitude.

Weena’s agony whenever he leaves her and her fear of the dark make the Time Traveller realize that the Eloi are not without fear and danger. One morning while seeking shelter from the heat he sees a white ape dash down the shaft of one of the wells he had previously observed. The Time Traveller concludes, feeling disgusted, that the Eloi are not the only species that have evolved from humans of his day: the Morlocks , as the ape beings are called, are human descendants, too.

The Time Traveller determines that the Eloi and Morlocks evolved as such because of the entrenched class divisions of Victorian England. The Eloi are the descendants of the British elite, and the Morlocks the descendants of the British poor—the Eloi, the Time Traveller believes, have been exploiting the Morlocks for centuries, and, as a result, have easy lives. Meanwhile, the Morlocks, toiling underground for the Eloi, can no longer bear to be in the light—their eyes have evolved in a way that light pains them.

Knowing that knowledge of the Morlocks might lead him to his time machine, the Time Traveller descends into one of the wells where he sees a room full of Morlocks and machines. He sees them eating meat, which tells him they are carnivorous, unlike the Eloi. When several Morlocks attack him, he uses matches to fend them off and barely escapes. He has a sense that the Morlocks are evil.

To search for weapons against the Morlocks, the Time Traveller and Weena voyage to a large green building that the Time Traveller had seen in the distance. On the way, Weena puts flowers in the Traveller’s pocket, as a kind gesture. He realizes while walking that the Morlocks are cannibals—they eat the Eloi—and this is the source of Weena’s great fear. The trip takes two days, but the green building turns out to be an abandoned museum, and inside it he finds a preserved box of matches and an iron bar he can use as a weapon. He and Weena head back for the garden with the goal of retrieving the time machine from the Sphinx statue.

The Time Traveller knows he will have to stop somewhere for the night, so he gathers kindling as they walk in order to start a fire that will keep them safe from Morlocks. Walking through a thick wood, the Time Traveller feels the Morlocks grabbing at him, so he puts his kindling down and sets it ablaze to protect them as they walk on. Outside the sphere of light, though, the Morlocks return and Weena faints. The Time Traveller starts a fire and falls asleep.

When he wakes up the fire is out, Weena is gone, and the Morlocks are attacking him. He fends them off with the iron bar and then realizes that his previous fire had started a forest fire, and the Morlocks are fleeing the blaze rushing towards him. The Time Traveller runs, too—he escapes, but Weena dies, and his matchbox disappears. He only has a few loose matches in his pocket as tools to get his time machine back.

Back at the Sphinx, the Time Traveller sleeps. When he awakens, the panels on the pedestal are open and he sees his time machine in plain sight. He casts aside his iron bar and enters the Sphinx, but as soon as he does the panels close and he is left in darkness with the Morlocks. Moreover, his matches don’t work because they are the kind that must be struck on the box. He fights them off enough to get on his time machine and pull the lever, barely escaping into the future.

The Time Traveller finds himself thousands more years in the future on a desolate beach where menacing giant crabs roam. He moves farther into the future to escape them, noticing the sun getting larger, the earth getting colder, and the air getting thinner. As signs of life wane, the Time Traveller gets scared and decides to return home. He pulls the lever and travels back to his dinner guests, disheveled and injured from his adventures.

While his guests remain skeptical of his adventures—his only evidence is that his time machine is dirty and dented and he has the strange flowers from Weena in his pocket—the narrator is inclined to believe. The narrator returns the next day and finds the Time Traveller preparing for another voyage. The Time Traveller tells the narrator to wait for him for a half hour, but the narrator says, sadly, that it has been three years and the narrator has not returned.

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The Time Machine: A Comedy review – malfunctioning merriment

New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich This riff on HG Wells’s sci-fi novella has a sharp cast but relies on a wearisome play-within-a-play concept and lacks momentum

I n 2021, HG Wells fans were aghast at the Royal Mint giving the Tripods an extra leg and the Invisible Man the wrong kind of hat on a new £2 coin. Well, shield your eyes, Wellsians! Here is a goofy comedy that makes the author himself a time-traveller, adds songs by Cher and jokes about Harry and Meghan, and invites one audience member to dress up in a monstrously bad Morlock outfit.

The Time Machine propels readers into the year 802701 to find a burning world riven by class conflict – pertinent themes for a bold comic treatment. But Steven Canny and John Nicholson’s script draws on the 1895 novella to focus almost entirely on tricksy gags about the logic and paradoxes of time travel. The show is structured around the over-familiar concept of actors putting on a shambolic play within the play. The effect, as with the recent adaptation of The Lavender Hill Mob , is frustratingly tinny.

Wells gave his time traveller twinkly eyes and “more than a touch of whim” so the beaming Dave Hearn is well cast in the central role and has a hugely likable presence – as do Amy Revelle and Michael Dylan. Hearn is best known for his irresistible appearances with Mischief Theatre and the show-goes-wrong style (out-of-sync lines, ham-fisted acting, outrageous innuendo) is used here to milder effect. Orla O’Loughlin’s amiable but fitfully funny production for Original Theatre Company often meanders and lacks the momentum that drives Mischief’s blissful comic hits.

An ongoing gag is that the problem with adapting The Time Machine is how many boring bits there are in the original. That’s a fair observation but these madcap proceedings become monotonous too. Time travel makes you ask really big questions about the future, we’re told, yet none are deeply pursued in a show that doesn’t dwell on Wells’s prescience.

A looser second half lets the actors step more out of character for some crowdwork and audience participation, much of it strangely generic. It ticks along because the performers are so skilled and personable but, as Dylan delivers a Hamlet soliloquy (by way of Withnail and I) and the trio dance to B*Witched , it feels as arbitrary as a four-legged Tripod.

At the New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich , until 4 March. Then touring until 29 April.

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Book Reviews

The world's smallest time machine is still pretty big.

Jason Sheehan

The Time Traveler's Almanac

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When it comes to anthologies, there are two kinds of readers: On the one hand, there are folks who hate them simply because they're not novels — because it's like having an entire table full of appetizers but never getting to the main course. On the other, wiser (and, no doubt, better looking) hand, there are those who say, "Sweet! A whole dinner of appetizers!" and then commence chewing their way gleefully through every word.

Needless to say, I'm of the second sort — a man who would gladly eat 12 plates of potato skins and fried cheese and call it dinner, and one who collects anthologies the way a Midwestern housewife does cat calendars. As such, The Time Traveler's Almanac , edited by power couple and professional time travelers Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, was perfect for me.

Well, almost. Really kinda-very-nearly-but-not-quite-entirely perfect.

On the good side? Time travel. Which, in terms of organizing themes for a sci-fi anthology, is rather like "Writers whose names contain a vowel" when it comes to getting to cherry-pick content, and pretty much guarantees a broad spread of talents. Everyone from H.G. Wells ("The Time Machine," natch) and Douglas Adams to Gene Wolfe, William Gibson and Charles Yu (who wrote How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe — a book so good that he got tapped to write a piece just for this volume, called "Top Ten Tips For Time Travelers").

The lineup in this book is like the guest list for the greatest cocktail party of all time — writers modern and not so, alive and dead, known tinkerers with the time stream and those who just got it in their heads one day to go back in time and kiss their great-grandmothers or whatever. Seriously, check out the 60-plus writers in the table of contents and if you don't find at least one name that makes you say "What kind of parents would name their child Cordwainer?" you can come over to my house and punch me right in the face.

And yes, I know it's a pseudonym. I was making a joke .

Other good stuff: Team VanderMeer broke the whole thing up into sections: "Experiments," "Communiques," "Mazes and Traps" (about paradoxes, of course) and "Reactionaries and Revolutionaries." This is handy when you're looking for a certain kind of time travel story but aren't sure who might've written one. And they've bookended their sections with what they call "Non-fiction, educational palate-cleansers," of which Charles Yu's aforementioned list of tips is one.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer run Cheeky Frawg, a publisher of science fiction and fantasy ebooks. Francesca Myman hide caption

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer run Cheeky Frawg, a publisher of science fiction and fantasy ebooks.

But like I said, the book isn't perfect. For one, it is MASSIVE. We're talking almost a thousand pages, which is seriously Bible-big and unwieldy and chunky like carrying around a paving stone.

I get it. This is necessary for a book stuffed with so many stories, which serves as a kind of overview of ten million years of time travel stories. But it makes the thing rough reading in small doses. It's the kind of book that makes you commit to reading it. And maybe wearing a back brace.

Second disappointment? In all of its 900-some pages, it didn't include my favorite time travel story ever, "The Albertine Notes" by Rick Moody. I know it's totally not fair to knock an anthology for the things it doesn't include, but I'm doing it anyway, and mostly to make a point, which is this:

In all of its 900-some pages, the only time travel story I love that didn't get included in The Time Traveler's Almanac is "The Albertine Notes." And that is truly remarkable. I mean, I'm no sci-fi dilettante. And I certainly know my way around a (fictional) time machine. I've been reading and nerding-out over this stuff for longer than is probably healthy, and the stories that truly moved me have burrowed in deep. They gunked up my brain with their time machines, dinosaurs and melancholy and all of them (save that one) are now all together, all in one place, just waiting to gunk up yours.

Movie Reviews

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"The Time Machine" is a witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing. It makes use of computer-aided graphics to create a future race of grubby underground beasties, who like the characters in "Battleship Earth" have evolved beyond the need for bathing and fingernail clippers. Since this race--the Morlocks--is allegedly a Darwinian offshoot of humans, and since they are remarkably unattractive, they call into question the theory that over a long period of time a race grows more attractive through natural selection. They are obviously the result of 800,000 years of ugly brides.

The film stars Guy Pearce as Alexander Hartdegen, a brilliant mathematician who hopes to use Einstein's earliest theories to build a machine to travel through time. He is in love with the beautiful Emma ( Sienna Guillory ), but on the very night when he proposes marriage, a tragedy happens, and he vows to travel back in time in his new machine and change the course of history.

The machine, which lacks so much as a seat belt, consists of whirling spheres encompassing a Victorian club chair. Convenient brass gauges spin to record the current date. Speed and direction are controlled by a joystick. The time machine has an uncanny ability to move in perfect synchronization with the Earth, so that it always lands in the same geographical spot, despite the fact that in the future large chunks of the moon (or all of it, according to the future race of Eloi) have fallen to the Earth, which should have had some effect on the orbit. Since it would be inconvenient if a time machine materialized miles in the air or deep underground, this is just as well.

We will not discuss paradoxes of time travel here, since such discussion makes any time travel movie impossible. Let us discuss instead an unintended journey, which Hartdegen makes to 8,000 centuries in the future, when Homo sapiens has split in two, into the Eloi and Morlocks. The Morlocks evolved underground in the dark ages after the moon's fall, and attack on the surface by popping up through dusty sinkholes. They hunt the Eloi for food. The Eloi are an attractive race of brown-skinned people whose civilization seems modeled on paintings by Rousseau; their life is an idyll of leafy bowers, waterfalls and elegant forest structures, but they are such fatalists about the Morlocks that instead of fighting them off, they all but salt and pepper themselves.

Alexander meets a beautiful Eloi woman named Mara ( Samantha Mumba ) and her sturdy young brother, befriends them and eventually journeys to the underworld to try to rescue her. This brings him into contact with the Uber-Morlock, a chalk-faced Jeremy Irons , who did not learn his lesson after playing an evil Mage named Profion in "Dungeons & Dragons." In broad outline, this future world matches the one depicted in George Pal's 1960 film "The Time Machine," although its blond, blue-eyed race of Eloi have been transformed into dusky sun people. One nevertheless tends to question romances between people who were born 800,000 years apart and have few conversations on subjects other than not being eaten. Convenient, that when humankind was splitting into two different races, both its branches continued to speak English.

The Morlocks and much of their world have been created by undistinguished animation. The Morlock hunters are supposed to be able to leap great distances with fearsome speed, but the animation turns them into cartoonish characters whose movements defy even the laws of gravity governing bodies in motion. Their movements are not remotely plausible, and it's disconcerting to see that while the Eloi are utterly unable to evade them, Irons, a professor who has scarcely left his laboratory for four years, is able to duck out of the way, bean them with big tree branches, etc.

Pearce, as the hero, makes the mistake of trying to give a good and realistic performance. Irons at least knows what kind of movie he's in, and hams it up accordingly. Pearce seems thoughtful, introspective, quiet, morose. Surely the inventor of a time machine should have a few screws loose, and the glint in his eye should not be from tears.

By the end of the movie, as he stands beside the beautiful Eloi woman and takes her hand, we are thinking, not of their future together, but about how he got from the Morlock caverns to the top of that mountain ridge in time to watch an explosion that takes only a few seconds. A Morlock could cover that distance, but not a mathematician, unless he has discovered worm holes as well.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

The Time Machine (2002)

Rated PG-13 Intense Sequences Of Action Violence

Guy Pearce as Alexander

Jeremy Irons as Uber-Morlock

Yancey Arias as Toren

Sienna Guillory as Emma

Samantha Mumba as Mara

Orlando Jones as Vox

Mark Addy as Dr. Philby

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• Simon Wells

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