Wells, H.G.: The Time Machine

Penguin © 2005 [orig. pub. 1895], 128 pages

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With a Kindle in one's hands, downloading and reading many older books that are no longer in copyright is both free and simple. Having thus come into possession of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine the other day by way of experimenting with the Kindle, I found myself reading it at once, and so, almost without meaning to begin it, I've finished. In the book, first published in 1895, an unidentified narrator relates what he and others were told by the so-called Time Traveller, at whose house they were accustomed to congregate on successive Thursdays. The Time Traveller had built a time machine which he showed to the assembled one week. The following week, arriving at his own house for dinner late, sockless, and apparently injured, he told them of the experiences he'd had in the future since their last meeting. The Time Traveller had in fact gone very far into the future, looking to discover the ultimate fate of the earth, but he spent most of his time in the year 802,701. There he was greeted by strange descendants of humanity, the Eloi--small, childlike, sexless, pasty people, all of them having "the same girlish rotundity of limb." They spoke an uncomplicated, mellifluous language and all dressed similarly. (Here is the antecedent for that Star Trek trope, noted by Jerry Seinfeld, wherein everyone in the future always wears the same outfit.) The Eloi were strangely uninquisitive, apparently fearless, and they seemed to live in a sort of paradise, where man had thoroughly subjugated nature to his needs and, having nothing further to fear or for which to strive, had become soft. So, at least, the Time Traveller thought at first. But his first impressions turned out to be horribly mistaken, and the novel, in the end, is deeply pessimistic about the ultimate progress of mankind, Wells having taken the development of the relationship between the haves and the have-nots to its distressing extreme.