Review: The Time Machine

The Time Machine, By H.G.Wells (1895)

The oldest book reviewed on this website. But it's a goodun. This was the first time-travel story to incorporate the idea of a machine, paving the way for over a century of inspired time-travel drama.

It's 1895 (well, the present day on release, but we'll let it go for now) and an inspiring inventor invites ten of his closest friends to see him travel through time using his latest machine. He says that he will go into the other room and simply disappear, and they will meet again in a week's time.

Only one friend visits Wells the next week, and he returns, with a story to tell. The rest of the book is in first person, and describes how by the year 800,000 the human race had evolved into two distinct subspecies; the Eloi, a diminuitive race that only feel happiness and are blind to grief, and the Morlocks, sub-terrainian ape-men blind to the light and that feast on the Eloi every night.

The time traveller is, of course, shocked by this development. He puts it down to the seperations between the working class (the Morlocks) and the upper class (the Eloi). (This is before the advent of the concept of communism and class revolution.) To make a story out of it, the time traveller becomes friends with an Eloi called Weena, who is kidnapped by the Morlocks for food, along with his time machine. And so, he goes in and saves the day with nothing more than a box of matches, like the scientist he is.
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He returns to the past with a flower from Weena, but none of the friends are willing to believe him, except the one that saw the flower. Cue the credits.

It's a fun and influential book, written in appreciable language and a sense of intrigue that drives forward the plot where otherwise plot advancement would be absent. It's a good read, a necessary read, and the pinacle of all science fiction.

Thanks.