he Time Traveler is never given a name. He is simply referred to by
his chosen vocation, like his associates the Psychologist, the Medical Man,
and the Provincial Mayor. These three are among the skeptics he shows a
model of a working time machine to, a clock-sized mechanism that he sends into
the future in front of their disbelieving eyes. He explains his theory of
time as a fourth dimension in straightforward terms, but none of his
associates are quite sure they believe him.
Then he appears abruptly at one of his own dinner parties, disheveled,
pale and dirty, with a half-healed wound on his face, limping and raving
about his need for meat. Once he gathers himself, he tells a bizarre story
of his first forays into the future, into the year 802,701 A.D., where
humanity seems to have evolved into a peaceful, near-sexless, simple race
called the Eloi. The Eloi are childlike, delicate vegetarians who accept
him without thought. They seem to have a vaguely communistic society,
living together in central palace-like buildings, but the Time Traveler
sees no sign that they produce anything themselves. He sees his
surroundings as a Utopian society, with no violence, competition, or
disease remaining--such a perfect world that its inhabitants have evolved
past the need for fear, thought or creation.
When his time machine suddenly disappears, the Time Traveler is forced
to reevaluate his theories. Exploring the future world more closely, he
finds signs that the Eloi aren't alone, and that they are still well acquainted with
fear. A second race, the Morlocks, live underground, preying on their weak
kin. And they clearly have control of the time machine.
The birth of a genre
Biographies of H.G. Wells inevitably seem to split the credit for his
career equally between his childhood poverty, Darwin's hotly debated
Origin Of Species, and his relationships with Darwinian tutor
T.H. Huxley and newspaper editor William Ernest Henley. Huxley may have
been responsible for Wells' lifelong fascination with scientific thought
and the future of the human race, but Henley was the man who elicited and
published--in two different Henley-helmed magazines over two years--the
serial sketches that were later collected as The Time Machine.
As Wells' first novel, it brought him instant literary fame, beginning his
career as a professional writer, prognosticator and an Isaac Asimov-like
"expert on everything."
As fiction, The Time Machine is short, fairly dry, and
achingly proper, particularly in comparison with Wells' later, more
sophisticated "scientific romances" like The Invisible Man and
The War of the Worlds. Most of the story is told as a monologue,
in flashback, erasing any sense of tension or interaction. It's less a
novel than a dramatized social critique, although it sparkles with
fantastic, thoughtful descriptions. In some ways, it's more an impersonal
portrait than a story.
But as the first novel to address the idea of traveling in time, it's a
singular work of virtuoso creativity. It remains one of the seminal works
of the entire science fiction genre, though the term "science fiction"
wouldn't be coined until 30 years after The Time Machine was published. And it's a critical Rosetta Stone for the rest of Wells' work. While his prose became more sophisticated over the years, the same issues passionately raised here would continue to inform his writing for the rest of his long and famous
career.
