Product Description

When a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year 802,701 AD, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realises that this beautiful people are simply remnants of a once-great culture – now weak and childishly afraid of the dark. They have every reason to be afraid: in deep tunnels beneath their paradise lurks another race descended from humanity – the sinister Morlocks. And when the scientist’s time machine vanishes, it becomes clear he must search these tunnels, if he is ever to return to his own era.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7603 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
H.G. Wells was a professional writer and journalist, who published more than a hundred books, including novels, histories, essays and programmes for world regeneration. Wells's prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction, but later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress. His controversial views on sexual equality and the shape of a truly developed nation remain directly relevant to our world today. He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, 'an important liberator of thought and action'. Marina Warner is a famed writer and critic. Patrick Parrinder has written on H.G. Wells, science fiction, James Joyce and the history of the English novel. Since 1986 he has been Professor of English at the University of Reading. Steven McLean is Secretary of the H.G. Wells Society. He recently completed his PhD on H.G. Wells at the University of Sheffield.

Customer Reviews

Wells explores where our tendencies will take us
Gulliver travels to different worlds through which Swift shows various possibilities, draws out certain tendencies, or caricatures certain characteristics of humanity.

Wells' Time Traveller only travels to one 'world' - the year 802,701 AD (he does also, briefly, travel to other times, but these are like a minor addendum to the main story) - but the Traveller's restless mind constantly strives to make sense of what he sees and encounters. Each of his theories, eroded and invalidated as the story progresses, shares with Gullver's different worlds the Swiftian purpose of explaining certain possibilities, tendencies and characteristics of humanity, this time enhanced with a new Darwinian (The Time Machine was published in 1895) scientific bent.

Wells continuously impreses me. This enourmously influential novella can be read in a single day. Part allegory, part dystopean treatsy, part adventure story, it is utterly compulsive.

Fantastic
What an exquisite short story.

The novel is fast moving and dark: at times short sentences drive the story forward, add pace and fuel the unease, fear and terror that the Morlocks bring.

There are many influences here, Wells was clearly influenced by the theories of Darwin; the development of species, and natural selection leading to the evolution of the Morlocks and the Eloi as separate races. Wells looks forward to man controlling the natural environment, with biological and pest control and perhaps genetic engineering and cloning; all members of the Eloi race being identical.

There are strong linkages here with Brave New World, with one class or race, providing for another. There are links also to War of the Worlds; the Artilleryman's wish to live underground to escape the Martians; perhaps Well's developed one from another, the link does seem inescapable.

The Morlock - Eloi symbiotic relationship drives the novel, when this ends chapter 11 feels out of place and does not perhaps add anything to the story; I finished this chapter thinking was this required? That apart, The Time Machine is a wonderful short novel

Short and sweet
The Time Machine is a deceptively small book; although only 90 pages long, it contains material for discussion that could help fill volumes. The further evolutionary development of our species, the ultimate fate of present attempts at social development, the possibility of breaching the space-time continuum, the appearance of the surface of the earth in countless millennia from now - these are all subjects explicitly tackled in the short space of this book.

One of the qualities I most like about Wells is his educated pessimism about the future. Whereas many authors think of the present as the necessary precondition for building a better future - and so unquestioningly accept the way things are now as a priori the way they need to be for a later better society - Wells criticises the established and the traditional, and sees in them the seeds of potential calamity. This is amply and unambiguously demonstrated in the degenerate races of The Time Machine: the Eloi and Morlocks function as logical evolutionary descendants of the upper- and working classes of Wells's time. Somewhat paradoxically therefore, the book also has the effect of investing human beings as we now are with great value: compared with the practically useless Eloi and the morally and culturally bankrupt Morlocks, we fare quite well.

Wells also has a tendency to go against plausible common-sense notions, and does it in such a way that he makes his alternatives equally plausible. It seems obvious that if we are more progressed now (at least technologically) than we were in the past, that we will be even more so in the distant future; but the Time Traveller has nothing to learn from the future - humans are far less intelligent than they were and their society is on the brink of total collapse. Wells's take on things is refreshing and cautionary.

My only beef with the book is that it ends a little abruptly and the later sections seems rushed. Other than that, it is a thoroughly enjoyable read that provides an unusual but respectable perspective on some 'big' issues.