The Time Machine (1895)

Appassionante, filosofico, affascinante. Di questo romanzo (o lungo racconto) ho apprezzato praticamente tutto.
L'avventura in sé innanzitutto, lo scontro del viaggiatore del tempo coi Morlocks, che prende ed è piacevole da leggere; la teoria filosofico-sociale che il Viaggiatore fornisce per spiegare l'umanità della Terra dell'anno 802.701, che dona alla vicenda un grande senso di profondità; i paesaggi di un mondo che è sempre il nostro, ma non è più il nostro e che in particolare nell'ultima parte si rivela completamente alieno.

Un grande classico, geniale per l'epoca (1895), ottimo ancora oggi. Da non perdere. ( )

Characters:
The Time Traveller
The Narrator
Weena

Setting: In a fantasy land in the future.

Theme: Little things in present times can change the future.

Genre: fantasy, science fiction.

Summary: This story is about a time traveller who creates a device that helps him travels into the future. In the land the he travels to, the land is a bit more barbaric and the species of beings has changed. He eventually makes friends with one of the beings and develops a relationship with her. The story continues with him interacting with the species.

Audience: Young adults and people who are interested science fiction
Curriculum ties: learning about different genres and writing styles.

Personal response: Time travelling as always been an interesting concept for me. I remember when I watched “Back to the Future” and how it made me really think about going into the future. This book elaborates going into the future in a more different kind of way. For the book to be written that long ago and for them to write about how the human race changes into a different species really creates an analytical part to the book. The writing of the book is very detailed and concise. While reading it, the reader can really imagine how the future may possibly change to the way it was in the book. ( )

In H. G. Wells's short but remarkable first novel a Time Traveler (thus called and never named) journeys from his Victorian London laboratory to the far distant future, then returns to tell his incredulous friends what he found.

On the initial test of his machine, the Time Traveler eschews the near future and leaps forward to the year 802,701. Here he finds a park-like landscape dotted with magnificent but crumbling edifices. Inhabiting these buildings are a people called the Eloi, diminutive and delicate in form, simple and child-like in manner. The Time Traveler is dismayed that humanity has regressed to such an extent in its decaying paradise. "It is a law of nature we overlook," he realizes, "that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble." He sees a parallel in the decline of physical strength and mental capacity. "For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.... I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been."

One characteristic of the Eloi is the absence of sexual differentiation. They are still male and female, they make love and have babies, but all physical secondary sex characteristics have disappeared, and there is no gender distinction in behavior or social roles. The Time Traveler muses that "where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity--indeed there is no necessity--for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to the children's needs disappears." He notes the beginnings of this even in his own day, and I suspect that if the Time Traveler had made a stopover in our own time he would have seen plenty of evidence to confirm his theory that sexual differentiation was already on the wane, at least culturally if not biologically.

The Time Traveler finds it necessary to make some revisions to his theory of human decline when he discovers that there is a second species of hominids, the Morlocks, living underground in perpetual darkness. They are more intelligent than the Eloi--at least to the extent of being able to maintain the vast machines which ventilate their troglodytic haunts--but are just as devoid of any creative impulse or higher passion. The Time Traveler theorizes that they are descendants of the proletariat who, even in his own day, dwelt and labored increasingly in conditions of subterranean confinement and crepuscular gloom.

The Time Traveler does more than just ruminate on the course of human evolution--there is also romance and danger. He forms a warm attachment to an Eloi lady named Weena, but is then relentlessly set upon by the vicious and crafty Morlocks. Finally he escapes into his time machine where he resumes his journey into the distant future, racing through millions of years to witness the dying of the very Earth itself and the Sun it circles.

Why does H. G. Wells give us this last awesome and forlorn look at the Earth's gradual demise? I think chiefly it is to showcase the scientific knowledge of the day, which could now contemplate such immensities free of the restraints of religion. But it also serves to put our own existence doubly into perspective: just as the life of an individual is dwarfed into insignificance by the history of our species, so does humanity itself pale in comparison to the universe we so briefly inhabit. ( )

The time traveler builds a time machine that takes him to year 802 701. There he meets the two forms humans have evolved into - the meek, cattle-like, vegatarians Eloi and the nocturnal, apelike, carnivorous Morlock. The two are opposed, and the time traveler takes the side of the Eloi, who " had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy," but his intervention creates havoc. ( )

This is the first book I read all the way through on a Kindle, and watched my progress in "locations" instead of pages. Do all time travel books become about the history of technology and man's relationship to it? The narrator is a Victorian gentleman who reports on his trip to the future non stop, with no pauses, and no dialogue. It is hard to believe that a group of men, the other characters from his time period, no matter how stalwart, would listen to such a long story without interrupting once and questioning some of the details. But still, since I am reading time travel books (When You Reach Me, A Wrinkle in Time) I wanted to try the granddaddy of them all. ( )