The Time Machine

It's funny, I remembered the central metaphor here all wrong--the Morlocks as gentle giants on the surface, the Eloi as exquisite vampires who prey on them. I guess I knew it didn't make any sense ("morlocks live underground" being surely part of our general cultural competency), but I didn't stop to think about it much and simply remembered this as one of the books my dad bribed me to read when I was a kid, the future world as magical and dark, and the further future as deeply chilling. It's interesting that it was that final future fantasy that stuck with me the most: the Morlocks and Eloi as a generic, if vivid, SF binary-opp society (and me getting all the details wrong), but the red dead sun, the slow-moving crabs, the slow fading show more of the last vestiges of the first heat of Creation and that polyp-like creature flopping and dying in the endless snow. Yikes! It makes you think, how long has it been since we had an end-of-the-world scenario that assumed our natural decline? Whether it's nuclear war or aliens or climate change or the matrix, present-day eschatology is all apocalypse, all the time. It's frivolous, histrionic, masturbatory. We are perfectionists who go to pieces at the slightest thing.

Contrast our Victorian Time Traveller and the "manly vigour of the race" (absolute Wellsian language here): these are people who finally have a basic scientific framework in place for understanding what life is, and they are eager to extend it even unto speculation about the building blocks of reality and what machines might be able to interfere with them, unto fables of devolution (from the precambrian we came, to the precambrian we shall return) and the interweaving of the biological and social (there are literally a billion ways to read the Es/Ms as mythologized capitalists and proles, and even Wells couldn't decide on just one, with the Time Traveller's shifting sense of where the (degenerate) mastery lies and where the (degenerate) abjection--in the end, mastery is abjection, and ownership of the means of production hasn't done the Morlocks any favours: I know I'd rather be a happy sexy Eloi even if my friends won't save me from drowning and the neighbours downstairs are getting ready to gut and fillet me.

It's shocking how it hits you right in your sense of what's real, in distinction, per above, from our currently favoured escapist end games tailormade for a romantic lead to shake his fist at God. Killing the deity and replacing him with evolution doesn't make us masters (in fact, having a skyfather makes us his favoured children); it displaces us once more from the centre, turns us into a mere chemical notion or momentary dissonance in the physical fabric. It is so much more tragic than the self-aggrandizing "end with violence" or "end with transcendence," since it happens so slowly there's no place for heroism at all. That reflects back on the nineteenth-century man of action at the centre too, of course, making of the Time Traveller, with his eugenic sensibilities and positivist social views and quickness to command the good small people and drub the bad, a kind of virile brain-brute, a veritable--to borrow the name of our local newspaper in "Victorian" Victoria, BC, if you can believe this--"Times-Colonist,"which when I was a kid I totally totally took to mean the "Colonist of Time," the paper that sails on through the times, broadsheets trim and newsprint-gray, collecting the events of the day and placing on them its imprimatur. "We were there. We told you how it was." On this day in history, the headlines said, TIME TRAVELLER PLANTS FLAG OF SCIENCE IN THE YEAR OF OUR WORLDVIEW 802,701.

It's actually just that the one paper the Times bought the other (the Colonist, still a fucked-up name). But in that light, how ripe is this book for any number of "Grendel"-style dip-and-flip inversions that expose the colonizer's total failure to get any of it right? Not only the gentle Morlocks as outlined above, but how about the smart Eloi, whose society actually sounds largely amazing, trying to drum up the interest to dim their sensibilities and teach this week's angry weirdo from the past how to speak their language and that they give of themselves to the Morlocks at the end of their lives because sustenance is a sacrament? Or the proto-(post-post-post-)fascist Morlocks that come back and invade Edwardian London and rule there? Some of these already exist, as many later writers have tried to fill out or address the Time Traveller's evident bewilderment. And it's a neat trick--Wells can't see his own biases, so he catapults his protgonist past the coming socialist utopia that the author himself certainly believed in and into a world so different that any attempt to navigate it is bound to end up as frustrated as the linen-suited orientalist trying to get a rickshaw. No wonder he was the blockbuster writer of his time! He's really good at being all things to all people. show less

A Victorian gentleman-scientist known only as the "Time Traveler" builds a machine that can transport him far into the future or back into the past. The machine takes the Time Traveler all the way to 802,701 A.D., where he finds that humanity has split into two separate species: the attractive but intellectually-limited Eloi, who dwell above ground in empty-minded happiness, and the brutish Morlocks, who live underground and fear light. The symbolism isn't very subtle; when the Time Traveler returns to the present day he tells his friends that he believes the dim Eloi are the descendants of the British upper crust, while the uncouth Morlocks' ancestry goes back to the country's working classes. He conjectures that the relative ease of show more Eloi lives caused the species' moral, physical and intellectual deterioration over the centuries. The Morlocks are still subservient to the Eloi in some respects, but after thousands of years, the underground creatures have found a shocking way to take advantage of the surface-dwellers' fragility.

In Wells' pessimistic vision, the forces of natural selection have led not to the improvement of humanity, as is commonly supposed, but to its decline. Despite the novella's age and familiarity (there are several adaptations and movie versions), I was surprised at how engrossing this work still is. I highly recommend it. show less

I am so glad that I am going back and re-reading H.G. Wells. I enjoyed reading him in high school, but, no offense to my younger self, I only appreciated Wells on one level. Just like I was blown away by my re-read of "The Island of Dr. Moreau," this book was just as stunning, although not as deeply disturbing. If you have not read Moreau, stop reading this review and go read it. We'll talk when you get back.

In Moreau, Wells explores the nature of man, his place in the scheme of things, as well as man's supposed moral nature set against the amorality of science. Clearly an example of Einstein's famous fear that "our technology has surpassed our humanity." Equally disturbing is the idea that the concept and identity of God clearly is a show more function of your own personal point of reference and a position ready to be filled by whomever has the power to take it.

In The Time Machine, Wells tackles society, economic realities, and evolution and presents a plausible and terrifying scenario. On one level we have a great sci-fi adventure about the evil and monstrous Moorlocks and the sheep-like but sympathetic Eloi. That is what I read as a kid. However on my re-read I was fascinated when I learned who these races represent and I really can't argue with his theories. I don't want to give anything away, because I HATE spoilers, but I will say that this novel is a social commentary on a level with anything written by Dickens and although I always enjoyed Wells as a masterful and creative story-teller, I now recognize Wells as a great thinker as well. I bought the Delphi edition of his complete works because I want to read everything the man wrote and spend some time with his work.

Then, as a sort of ad-on set piece at the end, Wells' scientist sets his time machine's dial to the distant future to observe, first hand, the end of the world. So logical that a scientist would do this, it fits perfectly into the story and shows how great a storyteller Wells was. However, this scene goes way beyond mere story-telling. I read this section several times. We have read this type of scene before but I will argue that it has never been done anywhere nearly as well as this. Chilling, creepy, unnerving, dark beyond description----absolutely brilliant. This set of scenes put this book onto my all time favorite shelf. show less

It's been a long time since I read this; it might be the only one of Wells's 1890s scientific romances I didn't have cause to reread at some point during graduate school. But here I am at last, and I'm glad I did. It's depressingly easy, sometimes, to forget how brilliant H.G. Wells was during the 1890s. Not only does he invent the genre we now calls "science fiction" by looking at the stories around him (time travel narrative, utopian narrative, future-war narrative) and figuring out how they work and then outdoing them all,* and not only does he have a better grasp on what science actually is than all his contemporaries, but he's just a really good writer. Like, there's some seriously gripping stuff when the Time Traveller fights the show more Morlocks, and Wells's eye for detail is great. That final sequence, with the Time Traveller on the beach of the dying Earth under a dying son, is a haunting image that I have remembered since reading this book in childhood.

One thing that struck me this time out was the scale of it all, and how inconceivable it really is. The Time Traveller ends up in the year 802,701 A.D. We currently think that homo sapiens evolved around 200,000 years ago; in 1895, things were a little less certain, and some thought the species might go back to the Pliocene (which ended 2.5 million years ago) or even the Miocene (which ended over 5 million years ago). Still, the gap between the Time Traveller's native period and the future era he travels to is longer than recorded history-- and yet he's constantly trying to figure out how this future world descends from his contemporary society. That's ridiculous, but I'm pretty sure it's the Time Traveller's mistake, not Wells's. One mustn't overlook that this is a very mediated story (the narrator is telling us a tale that the Time Traveller told him, so our access to what actually happened is pretty distant). The Time Traveller is constantly projecting narratives onto events that turn out to be false, though he always thinks that this one that he's currently operating under, this one is right... up until it's proved wrong. He has little self-awareness; no matter how long he's among the Eloi, for example, he seems to keep expecting Weena to act like a human of his home era. Anyway, it's patently absurd to find an answer for the biological divisions of the year 802,701 in the class divisions of 1895; he wouldn't look for an answer to the problems of the Victorian era in the events of 798,912 B.C, and yet he does the opposite.

He can't help it: we like to impose our narrative on history, and many of our narratives are nationalistic. (And we see in The War of the Worlds and The War in the Air evidence of Wells's obsession with the dangers of nationalistic narratives.) I was reminded of "England, Long and Long Ago," a piece on geological history from an 1860 issue of All the Year Round. As you can tell from the title, it makes this history of geology a history of England, even though the time of the iguanodon was 125 million years ago, long before "England" has any meaningful existence. We impose our narratives on history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the museum; there's an 1862 issue of All the Year Round that shows how the narrative of "England, Long and Long Ago" has been concretized in the form of "Owen's Museum." Of course, Wells shows how pointless this all is: when the Time Traveller goes to visit the museum to discover the story of the future, there's nothing for him there to discover. The museum is useless as a record of history, because 800,000 years is more than any human being or human institution can cope with. But the Time Traveller doesn't see this for what it is, and keeps trying to impose a familiar Victorian narrative on events that don't allow for it. But the fact that the span of evolutionary history wrecked this museum makes me think that Wells saw what his protagonist did not.

This, of course, raises the issue of what else Wells saw that the Time Traveller did not. I mentioned earlier that the narrator is always expecting the Eloi in the general and Weena in particular to act more human than they actually do. The touch of the Eloi he finds attractive; the touch of the Morlocks he finds repulsive. He sees the Morlocks as brutes and monsters, but it is the Eloi who do not tend their children, leaving them to fend for themselves. The Eloi are beautiful... but they have little else that convinces you of their humanity. Meanwhile, the Morlocks are cunning and possess intelligence and curiosity. But what if he's just projecting a narrative onto events again: the Eloi are beautiful and therefore good, while the Morlocks are hideous and therefore bad. Because of the influence of the George Pál film, no doubt, I always imagine that at the novel's end, the Time Traveller has returned to the future to help the Eloi make a go at it... But reading it this time, I started to wonder: What if he was backing the wrong side?

added September 2016:
My reread of a couple months ago inspired me to teach The Time Machine this summer in a class I taught on apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. What really rose to the forefront in teaching it was the book's scale: my students were really fascinated by a future narrative that went 800,000 years into the future, rather than a couple centuries like your Star Treks or whatever. And then of course the Time Traveller goes some 30 million years into the future and beyond, eventually ending up in a time where there's nothing but silence and darkness.

It's a bit staggering, and Wells does a good job of portraying just how staggering it all is. (Imagine how much more staggering it would be if you hadn't spent your whole life being educated that the Earth is millions of years old!) There's a lot of playing with scale: the crumbling museum the Time Traveller finds shows that the Victorian age is just a blip in the history of humankind. The differentiation of the Eloi and the Morlocks shows that civilization is just a blip in the history of humans. The strange beach inhabited by crabs shows that humanity is just a blip in the history of life. The empty beach shows that life is just a blip in the history of the Earth. And the coming darkness and silence show that the Earth is just a blip in the history of the universe. Wow.

It's enough to turn you into a nihilist. But when I asked my students if The Time Machine was a nihilistic book, they said they didn't think so, or at least they thought the Time Traveller wasn't. Otherwise, why would he care about Weena's flowers? His very ideals about societal and biological progress may have been shattered, but he still believes in something.

* Of course, Wells has to explain how his take is better than others'; the narrator specifically states that he has no guide in the future world, unlike in all those other utopian books you read. show less

[NOTE: I am actually reviewing the 1993 Everyman paperback edition with an introduction by Michael Moorcock. Goodreads' Search function is not very sophisticated.]

It is not always profitable to re-read what was remembered as a much loved text decades ago. I read Alldis' 'Non-Stop' not so long ago and was disappointed to find that the novel of ideas that I had thought I had read had become a much more conventional 1950s space opera.

If I now tremble at the prospect of re-reading the 'Helliconia' trilogy, I am very pleased that I took up Wells' classic once again. This I had read as a boy and a couple of times since if long ago. My latest reading was the most enjoyable yet.

It is a short novella and it is sensible to clear one's mind show more completely of all the subsequent film and TV versions. Go back to the book as if you are coming to it as fresh as might the reader of 1895. George Pal's 1960 film is a lot of fun but it is not a patch on the original.

First of all, Wells offers us a clarity of exposition, an easy use of language. While so much of the setting might be dated (including the clubbable atmosphere amongst the male pals of The Traveller), the book is as fresh to read as it was when he delivered it to the publishers.

Second, the ideas also seem fresh, despite that dated setting and our knowing how much more of it is impossible than might have seemed to be so then. For example, physically, little of what is in the museum the traveller discovers is likely to have lasted so long.

Michael Moorcock's introduction is the additional treat in the edition that I have because he declines to 'interpret' the work. He simply gives us its literary content and publishing history as a text. This means that we are left to experience the work without 'theory' but within its late Victorian context.

All the fascination of an autodidact (the creative equivalent of the individual inventor before the age of militarised Big Science), with science as potential and explicator of the world, is in Wells' text. An enthusiasm for potentiality is what makes this a classic founding document of science fiction.

In 1895, it was still regarded as possible that an individual in his private laboratory could solve the big questions of science and engineer solutions to problems. Building a time machine today (if possible) would require the resources, connections and determination of an Elon Musk and 1,000s of staff.

The long tail of Darwinism and astronomical observation is, of course, in this book - the speciation of class conflict, the genesis of a benign nature in which post-human cows live and the heat death of the universe and its associated devolution of life to adapt to new circumstances.

We have to remember that the distance between this book and the Origin of Species is well under forty years. That is roughly the time today from the beginnings of the collapse of communism. Ideologically, 'The Time Machine' sits at that point when the argument for science has been won.

Wells does not, therefore, have to be defensive about the theories on which he depends. He can take them for granted and then do what science fiction is supposed to - extrapolate what is taken for granted forward as speculations linked to the concerns of his day.

Wells is looking at the implications of science (much as science fiction does today with AI) for a world in which class relations appeared to be dysfunctional. 'The Island of Dr. Moreau' and 'War of the Worlds' would look at other issues through genetics and space travel.

What is curious is on whose side Wells comes down on when it comes to class conflict. His socialism is purely intellectual. He is still the lower middle class lad with aspirations rather than someone truly 'simpatico' with the worker in the pit or the factory.

He has come from below but, like so many petit-bourgeois critics of society, he wants his 'betters' to change their behaviours rather than emphasise agency for the working class. The Eloi are victims because they blindly allowed Morlocks to become Morlocks and prey on them.

Wells clearly does not want to be an Eloi as such but only to save the Eloi from themselves (perhaps so that he can join their world in this world with more surety) by getting the Eloi's ancestors to realise that some sort of compassionate socialism is the only way to stop Morlocks becoming Morlocks.

The Traveller loathes the Morlocks but not as the horrors of (say) the 2002 film but as degenerate, weak, cannibalistic, wormy, ape-like creatures and he despises the Eloi as equally degenerate, regressed, child-like, passive and ignorant self-created victims.

He does not want to 'civilise' the Morlocks (that would be futile and there is no late Victorian liberal imperialism in this text) while saving the Eloi is equally futile because they are incapable of salvation. As a good scientist, the Traveller thus 'observes' and tries to survive an alien world.

The emotional content emerges in respect to the duty of care he adopts towards Weena- a rather ambiguous one where there seems to be a disturbing if mild erotic charge to the relationship with the child-like creature even as the Traveller attempts to take a quasi-paternal and protective role.

It is probably all very innocent but we can start to call what he feels for Weena to be a form of love that is not sexual but one of affectionate obligation, of adoption into family. He will return with some plan (not revealed to us) to save her.

Clinical observation and self preservation are thus abandoned in favour of 'care' - Sorge, as Heidegger implies the term, to cover a sense of not only of concern but care and worry. This humanises the Traveller and shifts him into a new mode of being.

The blokey characters who theorise and pontificate at the start of the novella, including The Traveller, are never given personal names. They are 'stock' and part of the skill of Wells is in making stereotypes seem real. They allow the story to appear Olympian in tone.

However, as The Traveller moves from scientific observation to human engagement with someone with a name (Weena), we start to realise that this is primarily a moral tale masquerading as science fiction. Wells is writing about 'yearning' as he does later in 'The Door in the Wall' (1906).

By the time I finished the book this time around, 'The Time Machine' was no longer just an ur-text of modern science fiction. It had become something else - an occult essay in longing, both for a different world today and for some kind of love. It is a story about a search for purpose.

This counters any pessimistic interpretation of the story that majors on the grim heat death end of the planet and its slimy crab-like creatures engaged in a mindless struggle for survival. The return for Weena is a life-affirming (though possibly sacrificial) defiance of evolutionary necessity.

Yes, there is something dark in all this. We de-evolve as much as evolve and The Traveller never returns, the flower he brings back decays and Weena, if she has not been eaten, will never be anything more than a child-like pet. This is all fairly gloomy existentially.

On the other hand, despite that, the impulse to love as affection, compassion and kindness overwhelms clinical observation, theory and even the search for knowledge in an act of absurd self-sacrifice that says that, whatever we may become (Eloi or Morlocks), we are human now.

This assertion of the absurd - an existentialist theme 'avant la lettre' - is what most strikes me after so many readings. The science fiction is the tale that sells but something deeper bursts through to make the story a classic of literature, a tale of the human emerging despite itself. show less

For crying in the night! That's it?
The adventure ends and every bit of mystery remains a secret! At the height of intrigue, the story halts so abruptly my head is still spinning. I will not say it comes to an end because plainly there are chapters upon chapters more to be told! Where is the end? Where are the missing pages between the point where my eyes ran out of words and that sense of closure? This is a glorious job of storytelling! A book teeming with creativity! I want more!
Yes, the intent of Mr. Wells' work may have been to prove the folly of a class system that separates and oppresses. He points out in horrific fashion how the tables can drastically turn. And I grasp the message that trials and hardships do indeed compel the show more human race to seek greater knowledge, while total tranquility lends to stagnant lives and stupidity. Those points are made in the first excursion, but could not the story have continued with the same entrancing force simply for the sake of entertainment?
I'm left wanting to such a degree that I nearly hate the book as much as I love it!!! show less

A book that works on level upon level upon level. The first is the obvious - of the horror felt by the traveller as he reaches a future in which hope has been replaced with mind-dulling comfort and ease. Culture has been forgotten; the dark side of the world is precisely that, as if there is no grey: it lives underground.

On another level, this is the story of repression. The Eloi, the people who live in the light and merrily go from day to day, are really repressed, and in turn repress, those that live underground, the dreadful Morlocks. Wisely, Wells leaves much of the moralising to the reader.