The next stop in my time travel marathon (November being Science Fiction Month) was The Time Machine, the novella by H.G. Wells that touched off a prodigious period in which the book and theater critic published this title, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The War of the Worlds in a three year sprint from 1895 to 1898. Those narratives one after the other must have installed some sense of foreboding in readers apprehensive about the 20th century.The tale begins in a residential suburb of London on the Thames River, where a Young Man shares his encounter with an unnamed dinner party host he refers to only as The Time Traveler. The host lectures the men-about-town assembled on the possibilities of time travel, theorizing that Time is no different than the dimensions of Length, Breadth or Thickness and can moved about in a similar way. He produces a model the size of a small clock and proceeds to make it disappear, sending it, according to The Time Traveler, into the future.When some of the same the guests reassemble for dinner the following week, their host is nowhere to be found. He eventually enters covered in dust, pale faced, limping and missing his shoes. The Time Traveler reports that he's starved for meat and the Young Man correctly guesses that their host's tramp-like appearance has something to do with time travel. Gathering around the fireside after dinner, the Time Traveler begins to tell his story.Using a full sized model of his prototype, which I pictured as an amusement park Tilt-A-Whirl car, the Time Traveler claims to have rocketed forward into the year 802,000. The Thames River Valley is much warmer and now the home of a diminutive, childlike race of humanoids the Time Traveler refers to as the Eloi. No means of manufacturing or trade can be seen and the Eloi appear to wile away their time frolicking and sleeping. The Time Traveler later detects that they're afraid of the dark.When his Time Machine vanishes, the Time Traveler begins to inspect a series of vents that lead him into an underground network of tunnels. There he discovers another race of humanoids, the Morlocks, ape-like creatures with white bodies and a fear of light who sustain themselves by using the Eloi as meat. The Time Traveler makes a friend in a female member of the Eloi named Weena and together, they explore the tunnels in search of the explorer's time machine.Zzzzz.The Time Machine is the first book I've read in awhile that felt like an English Lit assignment. It's a box-checker, a square you can mark off to demonstrate you've read a lot of science fiction, a genre that Wells and his predecessors Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe practically founded. Other than paying your respects to the pioneers, there's very little in the story to recommend. I did enjoy the framing device that Wells uses. Like The Invisible Man, The Time Machine begins with a damn interesting tale, one of those that is spun over cigars and brandy around a fireplace in a drawing room. The Time Traveler's entrance onto and exit from this proscenium is the best thing about the book. Everything in between, dealing with time travel, was a snooze.The world of the future never excited me in the least. At no time did the Time Traveler really seem in danger. The concept of a time machine is used simply to imagine what the year 802,000 might be like, but there aren't any surprises, paradoxes, or tragedy that a time traveler might experience. Most of the time travel novels that would follow explored these themes, but Wells is more committed to notions and ideas and less to story and character. Most of Wells' characters don't even have names. Hollywood has visited Wells' source material twice. An action packed, Saturday matinee adaptation released in 1960 was directed by George Pal and featured the virile Rod Taylor as the Time Traveler, while a glamorous 2002 adaptation directed by Simon Wells (an animator with DreamWorks Animation and H.G. Wells' great-grandson) boasted Guy Pearce in the lead and tried to compete with the time travel spectacles that had come before it. Hardly classics, both movies are an improvement over the experience of reading the source material. The superlative variation of this story is Time After Time, with Malcolm McDowell playing H.G. Wells. The 1979 film ingeniously supposes that Wells actually built a time machine, which Jack the Ripper (David Warner) steals at a dinner party and uses to escape 90 years into the future. Wells pursues the serial killer to contemporary San Francisco, where he meets a beguiling bank teller played by Mary Steenburgen and suffers several anthropological misunderstandings, from run-ins with Hari Krishnas to the police.
So... I don't think there's any disputing that H.G. Wells was a genius and that his work was brilliant back in the day. But I just don't think that it ages all that well. Or maybe society has begun its long and inevitable evolution into the indolent beings Wells' time traveler claims that we become in roughly 800,000 years, and we don't want to think too hard about a narrative that takes some time to get to the point. Probably at some point between the Victorian era when this was written and the year eight hundred thousand whatever, we will have started beaming storypictures directly into our brains and thus have no need for narrative any longer. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and Wells was determined to use as many of them as possible. And so it is with maybe a tiny twinge of regret that I have to give this only 2 stars, because the narrative is where this book lost me. It was sooooooooooooooooo long and drawn out, with so many descriptions and so many needless details that my advanced future brain just wandered off in search of shiny things. I think the premise here is pretty cool, but the actual story didn't do much for me... Usually, at least in my experience, time travelers usually go BACK in time. Either to change something, or learn something, or just accidentally. This one went forward in time. Why? Because he could, I guess. He wanted to see where humanity ends up? I don't know. So, we find that in the year eight hundred thousand whatever that humanity has evolved along two different lines. An upper class set of Eloi, who are so advanced that they... do nothing? And the Morlocks, who have moved underground and adapted to a mole-like lifestyle. Until they ran out of food, anyway. But, I have a coupla problems with this book. For one, I don't think that that kind of evolution would happen in less than a million years, considering how long it's taken for humans to develop from pre-human primates to where we are now. Second... The time machine only moved through time. It stayed in the exact place it started, geographically, until it was moved by someone else. But, Earth is moving through space. Our solar system is moving through space. Our galaxy is moving through space. Everything is moving through space. If you were to jump in the air and skip a minute of time, where you land will not be where you started. It might not be far off, because it's only a minute, but it will be off. And if you were to travel eight hundred thousand whatever years in the future, the earth is no longer going to be in the same location in space. So... you probably land in the vacuum of space and die. When Mr. Time Traveler came back, as he had to do to tell his tale, and his time machine was moved several feet or yards or whatever away, I thought to myself, "OK so we're ignoring the moving through space thing... but how lucky for him that his machine was still located within the confines of his lab. What a shame it would have been to arrive back home and end up trapped in the wall because the machine was moved one foot too far to the left. Oopsie!"It must be a big lab. Third, I just don't see the Morlocks as scary or disgusting or, well, anything but pitiable. They evolved along a different line, or so Mr. Time Traveler theorizes, and that made them less pretty, and thus lower class citizens relegated to the sewers and given the upper class's scraps - which only further helped along their evolutionary distancing, if we go along with dude's theory. They become less human, and more primitive, and do what they need to do to survive, as ALL life does. But with attitudes like Mr. Time Traveler's, is it any wonder they became what they did? It's like Frankenstein's monster all over again. We create things we don't understand and then throw them away when they aren't pleasant. I bet this was scary shit when it was written, but now? I just feel sorry for the Morlocks and think that the Eloi and Mr. Time Traveler are a bunch of dicks. Boring ones, at that.
What do You think about The Time Machine (2002)?
The Time Machine is a classic novel in the Science Fiction genre but is it is an average book overall. It is short read at just over 100 pages that tells the story of a scientist who builds a time machine and travels 800,000 years into the future. Much of the story describes the time traveler’s surroundings and his assessment of the environment and society that he visits. The Time machine has been superseded by better time travel stories but this book can be credited as the pioneer of such tales.
—Sean
Stranded in India with nothing to read, I picked this granddaddy of science fiction up in an Indian 'American classic' print for 50 rupees (just over a US dollar) - a steal for both its literary importance and compelling story.One of the first sci-fi novels ever to be written from one of the first writers ever to write sci-fi, 'The Time Machine' is a short but captivating journey into the early 20th century imagination - and a fascinating extrapolation of popular philosophies.Though the science itself isn't nearly as deep as that you'd find in later sci-fi novels (the titular Time Machine is described as little more than a construction of ivory and "some transparent crystalline substance" with no attempt at how it actually works), the book is infused with socialist and evolutionary futurism.Wells, an outspoken socialist, seizes upon Darwin's theory of evolution and twists into a socialist vision of the future in which humans have diverged into new species: a carefree, vegetarian "bourgeois" that frolics about on the earth's surface and a deranged, carnivorous "working class" that slaves away in subterranean factories, emerging only to hunt the "bourgeois".Like Asimov's Foundation series, The Time Machine offers a warning to any society in danger of distributing its technical knowledge too narrowly. Asimov portrays an age in which man ignorantly worships science as a "magical" religion and all technical knowledge is ruled by a priestly elite whereas Wells suggests that such asymmetry might lead to a helpless, boringly uniform "upper" class.As with any book, the reader will interpret the story through his own lens, seeing what he wants to see, and I see a prescient call for open science ;)
—DJ
One of the most difficult courses I took in college was a class called Sociological Theory. The professor was either brilliant or a total nut, I’m still not sure, and one of the questions for our final exam was actually: Why? (Use diagrams to support your response).Ugh, ugh, ugh!!! I walked out of that class with a B and I kid you not, I have never worked so hard for a B in my life! I pity the one guy in my class who walked away with an A and don’t even want to think about what his social life was like during that semester because I know mine was down the tubes.At one point, the kooky prof mentioned The Time Machine as some interesting (but not required) reading to pick up on the side. But since he already had us reading upwards of 1,000 pages a week and we were required to hand in a 7-10 page paper every Monday (just for the one class!!!!), I was like, “screw you! H.G. Wells can kiss my ass!” And that’s the funny thing about regret. Because now I’m wishing I’d have made time in my busy schedule to read it. Maybe I should have blown off another class for a couple hours so I could have read The Time Machine. And then I could have thought about it in a state of mind that was open and receptive to what was being said and layering it with some weird, academic extrapolations and connections (the kind professors slurp up) and it would become something ultra-meaningful and profound. Or something. But no, I read it now. At age 29. Because I was dragging my feet and didn’t feel like finishing the book I’m supposed to be reading about Al Qaeda. And so the entire time I was reading it, I was like, “hm, interesting. If I was a younger person and still remembered the specific details about theories I studied in my past life as a student, the ideas in this book would have given me a nerd brain orgasm. And hot diggity damn! This book would have made a fantastic paper for my Soc. Theory class! By referencing several schools of sociological thought and combining those with discussions of evolution, social deconstruction and combining all that with the social norms of Victorian peoples—that would have knocked that prof’s socks off!"So anyway. I liked this book okay. I’m really not a huge science fiction fan and that aspect probably kept me from getting into it as much as I could have given its potential for creating nerd brain o’s. Plus, it was only 90 pages long. It’s hard to really get into something that’s that short. Parts of the story felt like they weren’t fleshed out enough and Wells seemed to have skimmed over several scenes that shouldn’t have been skimped on. But then I found out that his original intent for this story was to turn it into a full-fledged novel but that just never happened due to some financial burdens and it sort of made sense.The basic plot revolves around a Victorian gentleman and his theories about time travel. To prove them, he builds a machine and travels 800,000 years into the future where he befriends a group of people, the Eloi, who are descended from modern human beings. They are much shorter, childlike people who only eat fruit and spend most of their day playing games. They have no concept of work, they have no critical thinking skills and are incapable of logical reaction to problems. They are also terrified of the dark. After spending a few days with them, the Time Traveler discovers another distinct species, also descended from modern man but of a much more sinister nature. This second group lives underground, only comes out at night, is a bit more cunning than the gentle people who live aboveground and this group is also extremely predatory in that they cannibalize the Eloi. These are the Morlocks. The Time Traveler has several adventures during his time spent amongst the Eloi and the Morlocks and towards the end of the story, Wells makes some fairly blatant comparisons between the Eloi and the ultra-rich of our own society. If they spend their entire days being attended to by others, they will lose the ability to care for themselves and if they’re not careful, over the course of time and evolution of the species, they could turn into the Eloi, a group of wimpy wimpsters upon whom a life of privilege has backfired.
—Beth F.
