book review time machine

Lucy A. Snyder

Author • editor • writing instructor, book review: the time machine by h.g. wells.

November 4, 2005 Lucy A. Snyder book review , Uncategorized 2

Plot Summary (Spoilers Inevitably Follow)

H.G. Wells ‘ novel opens with the Time Traveler explaining his plans to travel in time to a group of his Victorian peers (most only named by an occupational label.) The next scene is a dinner party a week later with the narrator and a few of the Time Traveler’s previous guests. The Time Traveler enters the room in terrible shape. After he has cleaned up and has eaten, he begins to tell them of his trip in time.

The narratorial voice switches to that of the Traveler himself, and he tells them that he went to the year 802701 A.D. The England of the distant future is a beautiful place, almost a Utopia, but civilization is in majestic ruin. He first encounters the Eloi, a race of pretty, vacuous beings descended from humans. All other animals are apparently extinct, and the vegetarian Eloi have every need mysteriously provided for. Then, he discovers that someone has taken his time machine and he is frantic until he realizes that it has been locked in the bronze base of a nearby statue. He gives up on trying to free his machine, and later saves a drowning Eloi named Weena.

Weena tags along with the Traveler, and he soon discovers the existence of the Morlocks, a race of subterranean creatures descended from the human working class that maintain the underground machines that support the Eloi. He goes off exploring in the countryside with Weena in tow, and in the process of going through a ruined museum he lets the time get away from him and the Morlocks come out to attack after dark. He gets away from them, but inadvertently starts a forest fire and Weena is killed in the chaos.

The Traveler makes it back to the statue and finds that the doors are open. He goes inside to get his machine, and the Morlocks try to trap him. The Traveler manages to escape and goes far into the future to a time where the place he once lived is a beach with monstrous crabs. He travels on to an era near the end of the world, a time of darkness and cold. Then, he returns to his own time.

The only one who seems to believe his story is the narrator. The narrator goes into the lab to talk to the Time Traveller, but he and his machine are gone.

The Time Machine is a social doom prophecy. The future is presented as a place where the privileged have finally gotten a world where they can lead utterly carefree lives of leisure. Unfortunately, the centuries of soft living have turned the rich into weak and stupid creatures. Meanwhile, the working class has speciated into subterranean horrors that finally seek revenge on their former masters. This is to serve as an extrapolation of what Wells surely saw as a widening gulf between the rich and poor in Victorian England. Wells exaggerated the difference between the Morlocks and Eloi to warn the well-to-do and the British government that the social injustices of the day would prove ruinous if not corrected. Also, Wells warns everybody that the attainment of our ideal world, one with no pressure or work, would probably be fatal to the human race.

The Time Machine seems to compare favorably with mainstream literature of its day. When compared with more modern novels, science fiction or otherwise, parts of it seem a bit quaint and stuffy. Still, Wells was a good writer and the novel has a sense of wonder; it’s a fine adventure tale.

On the surface, the circumstances and science sound good, but they don’t hold up well if you know much about science. I accept the idea of the time machine, since that particular fantasy is central to the story, but there are a few other details that bothered me.

First, the Time Traveller describes the land as being devoid of fungi. The primary decomposers in an ecosystem are fungi; without them, you can’t have a gorgeous landscape. I guess Wells just didn’t want stinkhorns on his world.

Also, the Eloi are described as being disease-free. Perhaps science could get rid of parasites and viruses. But you can’t kill off the bacteria; otherwise, the whole ecosystem goes down. No decomposition, no nitrogen fixation, no plants … no Eloi. Since there must be bacteria, eventually you’ll have disease, since bacteria mutate quickly and will occupy any ecological niche that they can get started in.

The behavior of the Morlocks rang a little false with me. They’re intelligent enough to run the machines and lay a trap. Why didn’t they use weapons while trying to hunt the Time Traveler down? Chimpanzees and even crows use primitive tools. I suppose Wells kept the Morlocks unarmed so that the hero could get away; a party of armed Morlocks could have easily brained him.

Also, I didn’t completely believe the development of the Morlock society. I don’t think a working class, no matter how subjugated, could be kept down for so long. It only takes one extremely able person to get a revolution going, and in the time frame the novel spans I’m sure that the workers would have already rebelled successfully.

I think Wells was accurate in showing the evolutionary changes that could occur in several hundred thousand years’ time. The physical changes to the Eloi were pretty good; I have read other predictions that humans will get more androgynous and possibly smaller if automation progresses at its current pace.

However, I doubt the extent of their mental deterioration. I think that they would have had games and sports, and that would have almost guaranteed that at least some of the Eloi would not have been so small and weak. Humans love games; even in places where there is no literacy and no ambition, you have stickball and basketball and poker. The Eloi still had language, why not at least some balls to throw around?

My criticisms aside, I thought the novel has held up very well. Some of Wells’ scientific reasoning was off, but the knowledge of the day was limited. The story is good and fast-paced, and the descriptions are engaging. The novel lacks the literary ammunition of other works of the same period, but it paved the way for a whole lot of really excellent science fiction stories and novels.

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Review: The Time Machine – HG Wells – Spec Fict Lit
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Book Review: The Time Machine by HG Wells

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Wellss The Time Machine scarcely needs an introduction, so deeply incised is it on our collective social consciousness. Its one of those speculative novels that stands ahead of the crowd for several reasons: its themes of evolution and social class (er, and time travel), its status as one of the early popular works of science fiction, and its readability. And though it didnt quite strike the same readerly chord with me as The Invisible Man ( see my review ), I cant help but admit that Wells is in good form with this novel.

This famous novella is the account of an unnamed narrator, a scientist and futurist, who claims to have returned from a rather long-distance voyage indeedbut by long-distance, I mean, of course, chronologically rather than geographically. The man, it turns out, has 'spent a good deal of time as a time tourist some eight hundred thousand years in the future. And during this time he has had a truly unusual ethnographic encounter: he finds himself living amongst a society of human so far evolved that they are scarcely recognisable. But simple, linear evolution is not all that he encounters. It turns out that our future selves have split into two separately evolving groups, and our unnamed narrator spends his voyage attempting to understand the habitus of each.

Perhaps whats so fascinating about this book is its sense of utter alienation. The fact that the story is that of an unnamed narrator, but is in turn told by a similarly unnamed narrator, already positions the reader in such a way that they feel removed from the situation. Moreover, the narrators sheer inability to become a part of these societies despite his concerted efforts to learn and understand their ways is deeply moving, as is the fact that he struggles to be accepted by his peers, who are disbelieving of his tale to the end.

(While the social aspects of this novel are fairly hard hitting, there also seems to be an interesting commentary on story going on here. The fact that the narrators tale is automatically accepted as apocryphal, and nothing more than mere entertainment, is intriguing enough in itself, particularly given that the narrator positions himself as a man of serious learning (albeit one who jaunts off in a time machine just for the heck of it rather than for any scientific purpose). But language and narrative are also given a subordinate position in the world of the Eloi, the evolved (devolved?) humans with whom the traveller lives. He speaks of their language as simple and lacking abstract concepts, and their interactions seem to carry little information.)

The two future human races are highly specialised (in a not-so-subtle commentary of the hard-workin commoners vs the lazybum elites), with the Eloi a group of languid hedonist gadabouts, and the Morduk their more industrious counterparts doing more than their fair share to keep the world turning. But its a sort of loosely symbiotic relationship, with the Eloi reliant on the industry of the Morduk, and the Morduk cannibalising the Eloi come nighttime. I say loosely, though, as the Eloi live in fear of the Morduk, and are characterised as having been reduced to a sort of infantalism (an interesting trope that recurs through much speculative literature) as a result of their historically failing to pay attention to the sorts of pragmatic stuff generally required to get around in the world. But Wells is not so condemnatory as one might expect: he places judgements on both species, as well as on the modern-day narrator himself (who begins a relationship with one of the Eloi, and is characterised as a rather self-indulgent scientist), and endlessly asks the question of what makes someone human, and is one type, or aspect, of humanity better than another?

Still, perhaps what I personally found most interesting about the novel is its Philip K Dick-esque (okay, I know thats an anachronism) play on reality. The time travellers machine is described in such sketchy terms that it can scarcely be believed as an instrument of science, and the time travellers account is similarly sketchy and bizarre. The very nature of time travel means that hes away for only a short period of time, and the only proof of his travels is a crunched up flower. And given that the narrative is told in a twice-removed manner, the reader cant help but wonder whether any of the novel is true at all. Did the time traveller truly engage in such chronological shenanigans, and did he experience what he claims? Or is he simply using an imagined future to provide a warning about the current state of society? But the reality is that neither the truth, nor the journey matters: its only the outcome.

The Time Machine is the type of book that one could dissect for days, and remains surprisingly relevant today. Those very same questions regarding the role of science, the distribution of work and knowledge, of the origins and definition of humanity, and on notions of class and capitalism echo around us today, making for some interesting, and pertinent discussion.

Purchase The Time Machine from Amazon | Book Depository UK | Book Depository USA

See also our review of The Invisible Man

See also our review of The Island of Dr Moreau

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The time machine, by h g wells, recommendations from our site.

“This is the novel that inaugurated time travel as a sub-genre. Wells picked up the up-to-date (in the 1890s) scientific speculation about time being a fourth dimension, and ran with it, imagining a machine that could take a man backwards and forwards through time….It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it is smoothly and evocatively written, and it manages to open a chink in the reader’s mind that gives a dizzying, thrilling glimpse down the vertiginous perspectives of long time.” Read more...

Science Fiction Classics

Adam Roberts , Novelist

“It invents the idea of far-future visions that science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke have constantly tried to achieve.” Read more...

The Best H G Wells Books

Roger Luckhurst , Literary Scholar

Other books by H G Wells

The first men in the moon by h g wells, anticipations of the reactions of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought by h g wells, the war of the worlds by h g wells, the island of doctor moreau by h g wells, a modern utopia by h g wells, our most recommended books, war and peace by leo tolstoy, on liberty by john stuart mill, middlemarch by george eliot, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, republic by plato, the confessions by augustine (translated by maria boulding).

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The Time Machine: Notes Towards an Analysis of Wells’s Novella

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library , Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting appeal of H. G. Wells’s first great ‘scientific romance’

In some ways, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is a ‘timeless’ text: it continues to enjoy huge popularity (as witnessed by big film adaptations in 1960 and 2002, as well as the fact that the novel itself has never been out of print and is available in a range of editions), it continues to exert a considerable influence on the literature and cinema produced since, and its very narrative structure – with much of the action of the novel taking place in a time that hasn’t happened yet, the year 802,701 – in a sense absenting it from its own context.

But an analysis of Wells’s novella that sees it floating completely free of its 1890s context, much as the Time Traveller himself succeeds in leaving his late Victorian world behind, risks overlooking the extent to which The Time Machine is a novella deeply rooted in late nineteenth-century concerns.

The Time Machine and the future of society

In an interview published in 1899, Wells outlined his reasons for being so concerned with the future of mankind:

Why should four-fifths of the fiction of today be concerned with times that can never come again, while the future is scarcely speculated upon? At present we are almost helpless in the grip of circumstances, and I think we ought to strive to shape our destinies. Changes that directly affect the human race are taking place every day, but they are passed over unobserved .

This statement points up the value in speculating on the future, but in terms that are rooted in Wells’s present time: ‘fiction of today’, ‘At present’, ‘are taking place every day’. In The Living Novel , V. S. Pritchett remarked: ‘Without question The Time Machine is the best piece of writing. It will take its place among the great stories of our language. Like all excellent works it has meanings within its meaning’.

This notion of multi-layered significance – of ‘meaning within meaning’ is worth bearing in mind when considering the novel’s themes. Like many great works of science fiction , Wells uses the concept of time travel, and the invention of the time machine, as a vehicle for exploring the issues of his time: class, industrialisation, and the implications of Darwinian evolution, degeneration (a big concern in the 1890s), imperialism, and many other things.

The Time Machine and evolution

The Time Machine can be read as Wells’s attempt to understand the meaning of our existence in light of the theory of evolution, which had led many Victorians to question their firm faith in God and therefore in a Christian understanding of humanity’s purpose. If we’re not on Earth because God created us for his purpose, then what are we doing here? Is our existence merely random? Are we mere animals, albeit thinking ones? Partly what Wells is trying to do is examine the role of man in the modern world.

He does this, I think, through several oblique references to the story of Oedipus, the mythical King of Thebes who inadvertently fulfilled a prophecy which stated he would kill his father and marry his mother. However, what is less well-known in the Oedipus story is how Oedipus came to be King of Thebes in the first place: namely, by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and, through doing so, freeing the city of Thebes of its plague.

The Riddle which the Sphinx asked people, but which nobody else had managed to solve until Oedipus came along, was the following question: ‘What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?’ The answer is ‘Man’, because humans crawl on all fours as babies, walk upright on two legs during adulthood, and then use a walking-stick when they’re older.

Oedipus’ name literally means ‘swollen foot’, and the Time Traveller tells us that ‘I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful at the heel’. There are also numerous references (made by the book’s narrator) to the Time Traveller’s ‘lameness’ and the fact that when he returns to the present day he is ‘limping’.

Is the Time Traveller a modern-day Oedipus, attempting to solve the riddle of man – not over the course of one man’s lifetime (as Oedipus’ Sphinx had), but over the course of the entire species? In many ways The Time Machine offers itself to us as a modern myth for the scientific age: Oedipus among the machines.

The Time Machine and empire

Similarly, how might we read the imagery of Wells’s novella, and his use of certain tropes? Such features as the ‘pagoda-like plants’ and the ‘Palace of Green Porcelain’ evoke the Far East and, as part of this, the British Empire and the imperial romance as embodied by the work of such novelists as H. Rider Haggard .

But there are other, even more pervasive images in The Time Machine which are worthy of analysis, and I’d like to consider one such image in particular, as a way of reading the imagery of the novel in its late Victorian context. The image I wish to focus on is fire, and representations of fire.

The Time Machine and science

This entails not just images of heat but images of light: one of the laws of physics is that we cannot generate light without heat. Every artificial light-source we’ve yet invented, from the incandescent light-bulb to strobe lighting or the laser, involves generating heat in order to generate light. This heat-light relationship is one which Wells, with his scientific training, would have known well.

Consider the many references to suns, fires, flames, and bright lights in The Time Machine , such as the literal sunset and the way that it puts the Time Traveller in mind of the metaphorical ‘sunset of mankind’, as well as the sunset of the far future which the Time Traveller witnesses towards the end of the novella, and, let us not forget, his trusty matches which he uses to keep the Morlocks at bay.

Even just in the first few pages of the book, we have the narrator’s reference to the Time Traveller’s eyes which ‘twinkled’ (like a star?), his ‘flushed’ face, Filby’s ‘red hair’ (flame-haired, we might say), the ‘incandescent lights’, a very young man attempting to light his cigar over a lamp, and the Medical Man ‘staring hard at a coal in the fire’. Fire is everywhere in this short book.

But those matches are worth pondering. Man’s ability to create fire might be considered the starting-point of his technological development, but it is also often considered profane. Indeed, at the time of Wells’s novel a popular name for matches was ‘lucifers’, from the Latin for ‘light-bearer’; Lucifer is also, aptly, the Devil. For the Greeks, it was Prometheus who defied the gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to man; he was punished by the gods for this.

A novel often considered the first science-fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) , carries the subtitle The Modern Prometheus , continuing this tradition of seeing scientific experimentation as a dangerous way of playing God, and one that can only end in disaster. The Time Traveller’s matches are a reminder of this Promethean undercurrent to much science fiction, particularly in the nineteenth century when religion still played a more central part in the Victorians’ everyday lives.

The Time Machine and futility

Ultimately, of course, the Time Traveller’s journey into the far future of mankind is in vain: he finds out that man will evolve into barbarism and decadence, as embodied by the Morlocks and Eloi respectively, that books and civilisation will be left to fall into ruin. Even if he could warn his Victorian contemporaries about what lies in store for man, they refuse to believe him (with the exception of the novella’s narrator).

And even if something could be done to forestall man’s bleak future, the further vision which the Time Traveller experiences, involving the crab and the swollen sun, suggests that ultimately mankind will go extinct no matter what he does to prevent such a fate.

In this connection we might remark upon the Palace of Green Porcelain, clearly depicted by Wells as the remains of a science museum – as suggested by the Time Traveller’s likening of it to ‘some latter-day South Kensington’ – that region of London which houses the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, among other buildings. Tellingly, the Time Traveller remarks upon the ‘corroded metallic framework’ of the Palace, a phrase which picks up words the narrator had earlier used when confronted with the small model of the Time Machine: ‘a glittering metallic framework’.

The Time Traveller’s scientific invention is thus aligned with the Palace of Green Porcelain, but what was once ‘glittering’ is now ‘corroded’: science, that beacon of scientific discovery and exploration, has fallen into decay.

The Time Machine thus sounds a bleak note about humanity’s future – but in doing so, Wells always brings his readers back to the present, to the late Victorian world of the 1890s out of which this remarkable novella arose.

11 thoughts on “The Time Machine: Notes Towards an Analysis of Wells’s Novella”

Great connections. The Time Machine supposedly inspired the Dr. Who concept of bopping around to different points of time, going far backward and forward.

Now I have to read it again. Great post.

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You have reminded me that this a book that I must read before I run out of time.

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Good old H.G. – you can’t beat him for cracking stories which are always deeper than you might think on first reading. Great analysis!

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Book Review: “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, Illustrated by Alessandro Lecis and Alessandra Panzeri

Ale + Ale’s artistic style is described as a “surreal interpretation of reality” in their back-of-the-book bio. This style is particularly effective for The Time Machine , a story that even the narrator isn’t quite sure truly happened. The illustrations have a steampunk style, which any illustrated Wells book would be lost without. In addition, the artists use a variety of clippings and textures in their art to create a decoupage-like style with a distinctly Victorian feel. But my favorite thing about the illustrations is that they aren’t all literal depictions of what’s happening in each scene. Rather, they feel more like artistic renderings of what the world possibly looks like and don’t force one interpretation onto the reader. They suggest rather than force the reader to envision the world’s features and serve to emphasize the mood of the story more than anything else. They truly are “surreal interpretations” of a reality we readers aren’t even sure is real in the first place.

This edition also makes effective use of typographic features throughout the text. Some pages have only a few words on them, but those words are designed in such a way that emphasizes what’s happening in the story. For example, words are designed in a curve while describing the curve of the moon or scattered across the page like stars as the Time Traveller describes the night sky. Significant phrases are often emphasized this way, adding drama to the already dramatic story.

The text is one of my favorite examples of classic science fiction. H.G. Wells was so ahead of his time that you start to ask yourself if he really had invented a time machine. Ale + Ale’s modern illustrations serve to heighten the out-of-time feeling throughout this edition, which elevated the reading experience for me greatly, even though it is a story I already know well.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher, Rockport Publishers, for review.

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For the bookishly-minded.

REVIEW: The Time Machine – H.G. Wells

Author: H.G. Wells

UK Publisher: Penguin (this edition)

Genre: Science fiction

“I’ve had a most amazing time…” So begins the Time Traveller’s astonishing firsthand account of his journey eight hundred thousand years beyond his own era – and the story that launched H.G. Wells’ successful career. With a speculative leap that still fires the imagination, Wells sends his brave explorer to face a future burdened with our greatest hopes… and our darkest fears. A pull of the Time Machine’s lever propels him to the age of a slowly dying Earth. There he discovers two bizarre races – the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks – who not only symbolise the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of tomorrow as well.

A few years back, I went on a bit of a spree trying to read literature that would “improve” me. This meant trying to batter my way through a lot of classics. It took a lot of work, but I finally made it through Emma . Lorna Doone was tackled on a kindle while driving across Canada. I read the Great Gatsby in one sitting on the plane back to the UK. I really enjoyed Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , and I stumbled across The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells and thought it was wonderfully chilling. I never got around to reading The Time Machine , however, and given as lockdown has presented me with a lot more reading time than anticipated, I thought I’d seize the opportunity.

I had been pleasantly surprised by how easy The Island of Dr Moreau was to read, and at a mere 91 pages, I thought this would be a similarly easy undertaking. I was, sadly, incorrect. Where Dr Moreau was eldritch and unsettling, The Time Machine opens with a dense discussion of Victorian science and dimensional physics. It was definitely a bit of Wells flexing his scientific understanding to show off. I found it quite tricky to get through, although ironically this was my husband’s favourite part of the book and he said he felt it went downhill afterwards when the actual time travelling started.

The narrative is almost like a nature documentary, with the Time Traveller set apart from the other figures in the story as a sort of unbiased observer and impartial scientific voice. Except he’s anything but impartial, he’s judgy as heck. He describes the Eloi as beautiful, but as soon as he finds their societal values and methods different from his, he describes them as childlike, simple, and utterly useless. He seems charmed by their appearance, but otherwise mourns the loss of intellect and production. He treats them as pets, and the one he does “adopt” – Weena – he seems to care for only as long as it is convenient to do so, and he doesn’t take her comfort or safety into account. He only starts to see the Eloi as something more worthwhile when he encounters the Morlocks, but he doesn’t make much of an attempt to confirm his biases towards the Morlocks either.

At some points, the novel seems to trend towards being dangerously socialist. The Time Traveller talks about how the idle lifestyle of the wealthy and aristocratic has led to a race of beautiful idiots, incapable of any productive labour or higher thought. He talks of how the wealthy hoarding land and wealth pushes the working classes into a shrinking area of resources and space. He talks about how the poor are forced into constant industry, into the dark and literally underground. But then it progresses into these people lose civilisation, lose morals, and eventually become cannibalistic monsters. But while he seems to think this stratification of society is bad, he never empathises with the Morlocks in the same way he does with the Eloi.

He spends a bit of time going on about how the Eloi are the result of humanity no longer needing to struggle. Humans, he posits, are at their greatest when they are having to strive against something, to achieve something. When there is no longer need for struggle, then humanity will atrophy and become useless. What this overlooks is that there never ceased to be a need for struggle or work, it was just entirely forced upon another class of society. Funny how, after mourning the loss of mankind’s greatness due to lack of work when examining the Eloi, he doesn’t equally look at the Morlocks and start praising them for their noble industriousness. In fact, right from his first encounter with them he assumes they have nefarious intent based entirely on their appearance. He doesn’t try to investigate, he doesn’t try to explore their culture, he makes unconfirmed assumptions and then decides to run with them. At no point, either, does this philosopher and scientist show the slightest bit of self awareness on the hypocrisy of his assumptions and reactions. While he does identify times where he was wrong – such as the idea that there is no industry on future Earth, or nothing to cause fear – he doesn’t have the humility to go “I know I said humans were better then they had to deal with adversity, but I mean rich humans, and only a little adversity. The kind that doesn’t make you sweaty or too hungry.”

The last part of the novel is almost a different book as he shoots himself a thousand thousand years further into the future from where he was (which was already around 800,000 years on from where the book started), and finds himself on a dead Earth. Nearly dead. The planet has ceased to spin, the sun has grown larger and cooler, and half the world is an arid wasteland bathed in red light. One stop brings him to a beach filled with giant, crab-like creatures, the next to a world empty for all apparent life save a black, ball-like entity floating in the sea. These scenes are more tonally like Dr Moreau , that unsettling feeling of something very far from human, and I liked them a lot, but they felt a little pointless in terms of the greater narrative. They were plotless snapshots, and another chance for Wells to show off what he had perhaps learned about the lifecycle of stars and planets.

I’m glad I read it, and can add it to my list, but it isn’t the Wells I’d recommend to anyone who wanted to pick up his work for the first time.

A surprisingly dense piece for such a short book, it is more of an exploration of the philosophy of human nature with a bit of Victorian Science thrown in for flavour than it is an adventure story.
There are definitely some outdated views here, mostly in the complete lack of awareness of the narrator’s hypocrisy, lamenting that humans have become useless through lack of industry, but then being horrified at the creatures formed by the humans who were forced to take on all the industry.
If you want to tick Wells as an author off your list, I’d recommend The Island of Dr Moreau instead.

Rating: 2/5 – it was interesting seeing the science that would have been fairly modern at the time being used for fiction, in the way we extrapolate today, but otherwise I think it’s a book that hasn’t necessarily aged well.

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My husband adores this book, it is actually one of his favourites!

Love, Amie ❤ The Curvaceous Vegan

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I’m glad he enjoys it! I think there are some books which just really click with some people. 🙂

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – Book Review

Published 09/06/2017 · Updated 24/05/2022

The Time Machine

Author – H.G. Wells Publisher – Alma Classics Pages – 160 Release Date – 23rd March 2017 ISBN-13 – 978-1847496270 Format – paperback Reviewer – Clive I received a free copy of this book Post Contains Affiliate Links

A Victorian scientist and inventor creates a machine for propelling himself through time, and voyages to the year AD 802701, where he discovers a race of humanoids called the Eloi.

Their gently indolent way of life, set in a decaying city scape, leads the scientist to believe that they are the remnants of a once great civilization. He is forced to revise this assessment when he comes across the cave dwellings of threatening apelike creatures known as Morlocks, whose dark underground world he must explore to discover the terrible secrets of this fractured society, and the means of getting back to his own time.

A biting critique of class and social equality as well as an innovative and much imitated piece of science fiction which introduced the idea of time travel into the popular consciousness, The Time Machine is a profound and extraordinarily prescient novel.

The Time Machine was H.G. Wells’ first published novel and it was a development of his previous story The Chronic Argonauts which was first aired in the Science School Journal that he edited as an undergraduate. To me the writing lacked the colourful grammar and language of his later works and at 107 pages it is definitely on the brief side.

At the time H.G. was fascinated by anything scientific and by socialist politics; this storyline gave him an opportunity to include his comments on both.

Since then there have been countless works about time travel but at the time the concept was quite novel. To modern readers his design of a time machine seems rather ridiculous with the traveller seated in the open, exposed to the weather and other physical danger. The science behind it is very weak but as no one has since managed to find a way to travel through time who can say whether he was right or wrong.

The Time Machine gave me a pleasurable read and if you have not yet read The Time Traveller you should take advantage of this Alma Classic publication to do so. I have awarded three stars.

Book reviewed by Clive

Purchase links.

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometime shopkeeper, his mother a former lady’s maid. Although “Bertie” left school at fourteen to become a draper’s apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893.

In 1895, his immediately successful novel rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher’s salary. His other “scientific romances” – The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908) – won him distinction as the father of science fiction.

Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase “the war that will end war” to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: “Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me.”

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HG Wells' The Time Machine reviewed - archive, 1895

11 June 1895 The time traveller’s revelations are unlikely to excite regret on the part of his readers at having been born 802,000 years too soon

T he influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The Time Machine, by HG Wells (W Heinemann, pp 152, 1s 6d). By means of a marvellous piece of mechanism the inventor could either travel back through time or travel forward for thousands of years.

The machine itself is described, though, it is perhaps needless to say, not in so detailed a fashion that even the most ingenious of mechanicians would be able to construct one; but the greater part of the story describes the inventor’s voyage through the coming cycles and his experience of the Thames valley in the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One. We may at once say, however, that though he writes “of what the world will be when the years have died away,” his record is anything but a “gay” picture; nor are his revelations likely to excite regret on the part of his readers at having been born 802,000 years too soon. For though he was kindly received by a mild, diminutive people who were all strict vegetarians and lived entirely on fruit – horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs having become extinct, like the Icthyosaurus – he was compelled to come to the conclusion that the race had degenerated.

This was not all; he made the acquaintance of other creatures not unlike “human spiders,” and gradually the truth dawned on him “that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals; that the graceful children of the Upper world were not the only descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before one, was also heir to all the ages.”

In the course of his explorations the daring voyager had some very dreadful experiences, and he narrowly escaped losing the machine which brought him back to the nineteenth century. At the end of the story we are informed that the inventor has started on another voyage; but it is not very likely that the public will await his return and further accounts of the times that are to be with exceptional impatience.

From the Guardian archive
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The narrator introduces an eccentric scientist whom he refers to as the Time Traveler. After lunch one afternoon at the Time Traveler’s home, he and his colleagues discuss the theory of time being considered as a fourth dimension. By considering this, the Time Traveler explains that, much like how matter can move through space, it could also move through time. His colleagues either laugh or show skepticism. Determined to prove his colleagues wrong, the Time Traveler uses all his efforts and resources to build his time machine.

About a week later, the narrator returns to the time traveler’s home, where they see several people who work for the local newspaper. as they are waiting, their host arrives, looking the worse for wear. after eating a large meal (as if he hadn’t eaten in days), he escorts his guests to the smoking room where he tells of his adventure as the first man to travel through time. he relates how he successfully traveled to the year 802,701., there he found perfect, but simple-minded humans, eloi, who live in large palaces. the eloi were terrorized by a group of monstrous beings, morlocks, who live underground. when the time traveler’s time machine disappears, he frantically searches for it and is forced to unravel more details about this mysterious culture, and how human civilization came to this point. the more he discovers about this supposed utopia, the more he realizes that he has come to a very dark time and wonders if he will survive long enough to make it back home., h. g. wells is among one of the most notable classic sci-fi writers. the time machine is well’s claim to fame, and for good reason. the story went on to inspire three movies, several spin offs, tv shows, comic books, and indirectly inspired many sci-fi stories. even though it may classify as a short story, the time machine is every bit an exciting tale of adventure into the great unknown that will demand your attention and leave you pondering many deep questions. it is also very enjoyable to see how far the science fiction genre has evolved after more than 100 years., i would describe the time traveler as a pessimist. as he explores the future human civilization, he often describes his disappointment. the future is not as he had hoped it would be, and he is quick to assume the worst when analyzing the possibilities of how society came to be this way. the narrator, however, is a sharp contrast; he is optimistic when he hears the journey through time and is inspired by the prospect that human qualities, such as gratitude and mutual tenderness, are still very strong. this discovery, in his eyes, is what makes life worth living. i believe that it’s because of this contrast that the author purposefully left the story open-ended. the reader is free to interpret the future with either appreciation or animosity., if you enjoy stories that have you ponder philosophical questions, leave you in suspense, and give you the option to interpret them however you please, this is an excellent book to read., [amazon text=buy it on amazon&template=carousel&asin=0486284727], the bottom line, jennifer hicklin, leave a reply cancel reply, gdpr & ccpa:, privacy overview.

Themes and Analysis

The time machine, by h.g. wells.

H.G. Wells's book 'The Time Machine' cracks open several human social traditions offering among other things, a reasonable perspective on what ruins await humanity if it fails to dissever the practice of social classing.

About the Book

Article written by Israel Njoku

Degree in M.C.M with focus on Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

A total peek into the windows of the future, Wells’ masterpiece shows us how even the most superior of technological advancements cannot alter the perilous fate of humanity.

The Time Machine Themes

Continuity of human evolution.

While the timelines of history purport man as an unchanging being that would go on to last forever in its present form, H.G. Wells’s Time Machine springs out a rather severe and opposing perspective that bears a striking resemblance with that of the sciences.

In the book, we see in the years 802, 701 AD that man’s evolution through time is drastic and rapid, the result of which the time traveller himself finds hard to piece between the two worlds’ species. History is snubbed while Charles Darwin’s concept is embraced but not without a strange twist of things. In the future, it turns out that our present-day man would evolve into two different species in the form of Morlocks and Eloi.

Humanity Extinction and Universe’s Endures

With respect to all the hard work put in by man in terms of innovation and technological progress to make living better and enjoyable, the resultant futuristic outcome for man is tipped, in the book, to amount to non-existence: a state of nothingness.

We see, in chapter eleven, how the time traveller stumbles further into a bleak date in the future where he finds himself by the beach with no signs of human life – except for a scanty sighting of washed-off algae and giant crustaceans. He notices the sun has lost its shine – and the moon its shimmer. In all, Wells brings us to the reality that, despite man having to establish himself as the master of the universe and all creation, he lacks the power to control his own fate or tip the scale of immortality to his favour.

Capitalism, A Working Time Bomb

By Wells’s masterpiece, the reader sees a clear construction of anti-capitalism theory. Carl Marx’s Capitalism is touted, in the book, as playing a role of an indiscernible time bomb which – if not checked– will eventually explode and self-destruct humanity. This picture is billboarded in the reality of the cagey and very well risky coexistence between the two social classes – Morlocks and Eloi.

Comparative to the present world capitalism, the former comfortably suits well as the working class, a poor, over-labouring, and marginalized group that does all the work for the latter, Eloi, a group for the affluent in society. H.G. Wells points out how the ancestors of the upper class, or Eloi, may have pushed that of the working class, or Morlocks, and this happening over time ensures that they are forced underground and into a lifestyle of the nocturnal.

Assured by their advanced civilization, the upper class occupies the overworld basking in the abundance of social amenities, unaware they are getting lazy, weak, and dependent on the Morlocks. The Morlocks, on the other hand, who stay up all night underground running the factories and industries start to gain power and momentum to the point that they now covertly eat the Eloi. Even though the story is an abstract mirroring of Marx’s industrial Capitalism, Wells no doubt seized the opportunity to warn Victorian England to tread with caution in the practice of divided social classes.

Technology and Progress Strive

Replete with scientific concepts and mathematical theories, H.G. Wells’s Time Machine gives the reader a sense of a continued ardency in pursuance of creativity, inventions, and intelligence.

However, Wells opts to point out a gradual decline in the investment in technology and progress by man, and this is seen in the way that the Eloi stopped working on further advancement and instead decided to relax on the technological Utopia they’ve created for themselves. To this effect, they’ve become lazy, unproductive, and dependent. Wells announces that the Eloi loses momentum with the Morlocks the moment they started this practice and it went on and undid them.

Generosity And Affection

The time traveller’s journey through time shows how, at every stage, humanity manages to shed off fundamental aspects of living for which it is known, but affection and generosity appear to be perhaps the most enduring traits Wells tips to remain with man for many years to come. Weena, one of the Eloi, is an exemplification of how humans remain affectionate through time. She is full of love, tenderness, and care, and she expresses it in a plethora of ways to the time traveller who even brought home a souvenir – courtesy of Weena – as proof to the guys.

A Depiction Of Social Class And Inequality

Far from aiming at a mere appeal to literature, Wells’ structuring of the story in ‘ The Time Machine ‘ is reflective of the times that he lived, a time of great anxiety fueled by the practice of social classing and Socioeconomic Inequality. Although the setting may have been shifted into the future several hundred thousand years later, it was still w rallying cry calling for swift action from his contemporaries and the Victorian authorities of his present generation.

Analysis of Key Moments in The Time Machine

The location is Richmond, Surrey, England. A group of guys including the narrator hang out after dinner at the home of a scientist and inventor – who is known as the ‘time traveller.’
Each person in the group represents different important disciplines and works of life relevant to the Victorian era of their time.
As they sit in comfy chairs drinking and making merriment, their host wows them with the story about how time is the fourth dimension and how, like the cube, it has all three properties in length, width and height. He tells them it is possible to go back and forth through time.
Many of them argue and object to this claim but get even more excited when the time traveller shows them a small prototype time machine from his lab and then makes it go away.
Even with the hard proof, his guests do not believe him. He is forced to reveal the human-size time machine; still, no one believes. Their major reason for doubting their host is because he’s a known trickster who once fooled them with a fake ghost display the previous Christmas. His guests leave, a minority in disbelief.
The next week the narrator goes back to meet the guys at the home of the intriguing time traveller, but ironically, it turns out their host – who claims to know time so well – is late for his dinner party.
Anyways, he appears in the middle of dinner looking dirty and tattered, tells them he has a great time-travel story to tell them but warns they must not interrupt or mock him. They agree, and he begins his story.
The time traveller zooms into the future to the year 802, 701 AD parking in a hailstorm by the giant white sphinx and is arrested by creatures called Eloi.
His captors mistake him for a God and instead of incarcerating him, shower him with beautiful flowers and organize a banquet for him at their biggest building. He abandons his vehicle but disconnects the levers before leaving.
As the nights draw close, he leaves the company of the Eloi to get his time machine where he parked it by the giant sphinx statue but finds out another set of underground creatures called the Morlocks have hidden it in a lock under the big statue.
In his quest to retrieve his machine, he befriends an Eloi called Weena to help him after he saves her from drowning in the river.
He attempts to infiltrate the Morlocks intel by clambering down a well, but Weena is upset and scared for him.
He almost gets killed by a mob of Morlocks after he catches them feasting on a slain Eloi. However, he luckily escapes to the surface and passed out near Weena.
Scared and unsafe, he and Weena search for safety for the night as far off as a place called ‘The Green Porcelain.’
Excited Weena expresses affection towards the time traveller as she stuffs his pockets with flowers which he would eventually bring back with him to the present day.
At the Green Porcelain, he finds some weapons – a mace, combustible camphor, and some matches which turn out to be an Achilles heel for the Morlocks.
As they travel back, he accidentally sets a fire in the forest in a failed bid to seek warmth for him and Weena.
He is attacked by encamped Morlocks but he fights them off. However, as the forest fire grows bigger, the Morlocks retreat but he loses Weena in the process.
He heads back to the giant sphinx and discovers the lock has been broken. He walks into his time machine but still has to fend off some Morlocks after which he disappears further into the future.
He stops on a beach and finds there’s no sign of human existence, only lichens and hostile crabs. He hops on his time machine and goes deeper thousands of thousands of years in the future.
He stumbles into a place that feels like the end of all life and time, where the only sign of life is a dark rock-like entity which appears to be drawing close to him. At this point, he is so scared and goes back home.
He comes back to the present-day to meet the guys but he’s late for dinner. Again, no one except the narrator is close to believing his story even after he shows them the now jaded time machine.
The inquisitive narrator comes back to visit the next day as the traveller prepares for his time trip. He tells the narrator to wait at his house and that he would bring back better proof. The narrator waits but the time traveller never returns.

Style, Tone, And Figurative Language Of The Time Machine

There’s a general sense of a shared narrative responsibility in Wells’s Time Machine, and we see that being manifested in the events throughout the story. Well tells his story using two narrators – First, Hillyer and then the time traveller.

Hillyer is used through chapters one and two, effectively, to introduce the guests as well as to usher in the time traveller who does the main story – from chapters three to twelve – making way for Hillyer again to tell the epilogue. Well deploys this technique to break down the complexity of the story so readers can understand it better.

With regard to tone, Wells opts for a direct and earnest pattern. The time traveller’s rendition of his story is completely above-board, and this is mostly because he yearns for his story to be believed by his guests. Notably, too, the tone is disburdened with emotions and we could see that play out at the event of Weena’s death.

Figurative Language

Wells’s use of figurative language is impressive and replete throughout the story. For one, the story employs personification as early as possible as seen on p.9:

There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped…

Here and there, there’s also a cheek use of metaphor, and one that especially catches the eyes is seen on p.36:

The whole earth had become a garden.

Driven to give a detailed sense of ominous sound in a suspense-filled scene, Wells brings onomatopoeia into play at p.18:

A pitiless hail was hissing round me…

Narrative Point Of View

The book is tailored to the narration of two persons – Hillyer and the time traveller but ultimately has a first-person narrative technique.

Analysis of Symbols in The Time Machine

There is a strong sense of hope brought in by the time machine. Apart from the contraption enabling its rider to transcend through time, we see scenarios where, when it feels like the time traveller is endangered and being cornered, the machine dives right into the rescue.

These plants bear a unique symbol of peace and of expression of love. The Eloi are peace-loving creatures and attest to that by their gifts of flowers. Weena uses them to express her appreciation and love for the time traveller.

The White Sphinx

This object bearing a human head and the body of a lion can be seen as a symbol of a superior being, a God who sets the limitation for man. He appears to be warning the time traveller of the rangers of breaking his cosmic boundaries.

Morlocks and Eloi

Well elects to feature the Morlocks and Eloi as the advanced physical and biological destination of man. While they serve as the major creatures that dominate Wells’s story, the Morlocks symbolize the poor working class and the dregs who do all labour for the Eloi, the rich but lazy and indolent upper class.

How does the time machine work in HG Wells’s book?

H.G. Wells time machine has two levers and a seat to be sat upon. According to the description we get from the narrator who’s also the time traveller, one lever propels one into the future while the other into the past.

What is H.G. Wells’ time machine made of?

The time machine in H.G. Wells book is described as being made of glittering metallic frames, perhaps comparable to that of bronze and brass.

What are the two main stories of ‘ The Time Machine ?’

There are at least two story threads buried in the book by H.G. Wells. The adventure of the Eloi and Morlocks is one of them, while the voyage of the time traveller’s machine through time is another.

Why are the Eloi Afraid of the Dark?

In the book ‘ The Time Machine ‘, the closest reason why the Eloi are scared of the dark could be because they disappear and never come back or be seen again. The reason for their disappearance is perhaps because they are being eaten by the Morlocks who are masters of the dark corners and alleys.

Why is Wells’ ‘ The Time Machine ‘ Very Critical of Marx’s Capitalism?

Wells lived during the Victorian era in England, a society that practiced a class system. However, coming from a poor background and being part of the lower class, Wells saw firsthand the impact of such social diversity that he predicted the likely outcome many years to come if something is not done fast.

About Israel Njoku

Israel loves to delve into rigorous analysis of themes with broader implications. As a passionate book lover and reviewer, Israel aims to contribute meaningful insights into broader discussions.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the time machine.

About the Book

The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond , Surrey, identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller. The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension . He then reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person, and returns at dinner the following week to recount a remarkable tale, becoming the new narrator.

In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device with a journey that takes him to 802,701 A.D., where he meets the Eloi, a society of small childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, doing no work and having a frugivorous diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline, and he speculates that they are a peaceful communist society.

Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller is shocked to find his time machine missing, and eventually works out that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure. Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Within their dwellings he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise possible.

He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutish light-fearing Morlocks. Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that they feed on the Eloi. The Time Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak.

The Morlocks use the time machine as bait to ensnare the Traveller and he travels further ahead to roughly 30 million years from his own time. There he sees some of the last living things on a dying Earth, menacing reddish crab-like creatures slowly wandering the blood-red beaches chasing butterflies in a world covered in simple lichenous vegetation. He continues to make short jumps through time, seeing Earth's rotation gradually cease and the sun grow larger, redder, and dimmer, and the world falling silent and freezing out.

Overwhelmed, he returns to his laboratory, arriving just three hours after he originally left. The original narrator takes over and relates that he returned to the Time Traveller's house the next day, finding him in final preparations for another journey. The Traveller promises to return in half an hour, but three years later, the narrator despairs of ever learning what became of him.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Publication Date: September 16, 2008
Genres: Fantasy , Fiction , Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN-10: 0393927946
ISBN-13: 9780393927948

The Time Machine

H. g. wells, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Time Machine is a work of science-fiction that imagines how the social conditions of Victorian England have evolved in the year 802,701. The story opens on a dinner party at the home of an eminent scientist, the Time Traveller , who is explaining to his assembled guests (including the narrator telling the story) principles of science and math that support the possibility of traveling across time, just as one would travel across space. His guests are upper class British men—a doctor, a psychologist, a journalist, etc.—and they greet his pronouncements with skepticism.

To demonstrate the validity of his ideas, the Time Traveller brings into the living room a small model of a machine. The psychologist, ever skeptical, depresses a lever and the machine disappears. The Time Traveller then reveals that he has almost completed a life-sized machine that will transport him through time. He shows the machine to the guests, but they remain skeptical.

At dinner the following week, the Time Traveller is not there to greet his guests. He has left a note instructing them to proceed with dinner if he is late, and partway through their dinner the Time Traveller staggers into the house looking disheveled and injured. Once the Time Traveller has washed up, he agrees to tell his story in full on the condition that nobody argues with him or asks questions, since he is terribly exhausted.

The Time Traveller says that the previous week he finished his machine and took a voyage into the future. He arrived in the year 802,701 on the spot where his laboratory once stood—it had become a garden of strange flowers beside a large white Sphinx statue. He saw small humanlike beings (whom Wells later reveals are called the Eloi ), and they seemed feeble and much less intelligent than he hoped the people of the future would be.

The Time Traveller continues his tale: the beings are friendly to him, and he begins to explore the landscape for clues to what has happened. There seems to be no adversity, fear, or labor in this world, and the Time Traveller hypothesizes that this is a communist utopia of the future, in which all social problems have been solved. He believes that this explains the weakness and stupidity of the beings—there is no need for force or intelligence in a world of peace and plenty. The Time Traveller is briefly delighted, but, despite thinking that all problems are solved, he still feels disappointed that future humans are not smarter or more curious.

When the Time Traveller returns to the garden where he landed he realizes that his time machine is gone. He briefly goes into a rage-fueled panic, and then decides that the rational course of action is to study this new world, learn its ways, and let this knowledge lead him back to the time machine. Seeing grooves in the grass leads him to believe that the machine has been hidden behind a metal panel in the pedestal of the Sphinx statue, but it won’t give when he tries to open it.

The Time Traveller begins learning the language of the Eloi (which is very simple) and he explores the landscape, noticing a strange network of dry wells and towers, which suggests a large underground ventilation system. He also notices that the Eloi never seem to do any work, but their sandals look new and their clothes are not frayed. This observation, combined with his having felt something touching him at night and having caught a glimpse of a strange white animal, leads him to determine that his original utopian explanation is inadequate. Later that day he rescues a drowning Eloi. Her name is Weena , and she begins giving him flowers and following him everywhere to express her gratitude.

Weena’s agony whenever he leaves her and her fear of the dark make the Time Traveller realize that the Eloi are not without fear and danger. One morning while seeking shelter from the heat he sees a white ape dash down the shaft of one of the wells he had previously observed. The Time Traveller concludes, feeling disgusted, that the Eloi are not the only species that have evolved from humans of his day: the Morlocks , as the ape beings are called, are human descendants, too.

The Time Traveller determines that the Eloi and Morlocks evolved as such because of the entrenched class divisions of Victorian England. The Eloi are the descendants of the British elite, and the Morlocks the descendants of the British poor—the Eloi, the Time Traveller believes, have been exploiting the Morlocks for centuries, and, as a result, have easy lives. Meanwhile, the Morlocks, toiling underground for the Eloi, can no longer bear to be in the light—their eyes have evolved in a way that light pains them.

Knowing that knowledge of the Morlocks might lead him to his time machine, the Time Traveller descends into one of the wells where he sees a room full of Morlocks and machines. He sees them eating meat, which tells him they are carnivorous, unlike the Eloi. When several Morlocks attack him, he uses matches to fend them off and barely escapes. He has a sense that the Morlocks are evil.

To search for weapons against the Morlocks, the Time Traveller and Weena voyage to a large green building that the Time Traveller had seen in the distance. On the way, Weena puts flowers in the Traveller’s pocket, as a kind gesture. He realizes while walking that the Morlocks are cannibals—they eat the Eloi—and this is the source of Weena’s great fear. The trip takes two days, but the green building turns out to be an abandoned museum, and inside it he finds a preserved box of matches and an iron bar he can use as a weapon. He and Weena head back for the garden with the goal of retrieving the time machine from the Sphinx statue.

The Time Traveller knows he will have to stop somewhere for the night, so he gathers kindling as they walk in order to start a fire that will keep them safe from Morlocks. Walking through a thick wood, the Time Traveller feels the Morlocks grabbing at him, so he puts his kindling down and sets it ablaze to protect them as they walk on. Outside the sphere of light, though, the Morlocks return and Weena faints. The Time Traveller starts a fire and falls asleep.

When he wakes up the fire is out, Weena is gone, and the Morlocks are attacking him. He fends them off with the iron bar and then realizes that his previous fire had started a forest fire, and the Morlocks are fleeing the blaze rushing towards him. The Time Traveller runs, too—he escapes, but Weena dies, and his matchbox disappears. He only has a few loose matches in his pocket as tools to get his time machine back.

Back at the Sphinx, the Time Traveller sleeps. When he awakens, the panels on the pedestal are open and he sees his time machine in plain sight. He casts aside his iron bar and enters the Sphinx, but as soon as he does the panels close and he is left in darkness with the Morlocks. Moreover, his matches don’t work because they are the kind that must be struck on the box. He fights them off enough to get on his time machine and pull the lever, barely escaping into the future.

The Time Traveller finds himself thousands more years in the future on a desolate beach where menacing giant crabs roam. He moves farther into the future to escape them, noticing the sun getting larger, the earth getting colder, and the air getting thinner. As signs of life wane, the Time Traveller gets scared and decides to return home. He pulls the lever and travels back to his dinner guests, disheveled and injured from his adventures.

While his guests remain skeptical of his adventures—his only evidence is that his time machine is dirty and dented and he has the strange flowers from Weena in his pocket—the narrator is inclined to believe. The narrator returns the next day and finds the Time Traveller preparing for another voyage. The Time Traveller tells the narrator to wait for him for a half hour, but the narrator says, sadly, that it has been three years and the narrator has not returned.

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The Time Machine Mass Market Paperback – January 1, 1984

Purchase options and add-ons.

Print length 113 pages
Language English
Publication date January 1, 1984
Reading age 18 years and up
Dimensions 6 x 0.26 x 9 inches
ISBN-10 0553213512
ISBN-13 978-0553213515
Lexile measure 1010L
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam Classics (January 1, 1984)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 113 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553213512
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553213515
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1010L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.26 x 9 inches
#43 in Classic Action & Adventure (Books)
#604 in Classic Literature & Fiction
#850 in Science Fiction Adventures

About the author

H. g. wells.

The son of a professional cricketer and a lady's maid, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) served apprenticeships as a draper and a chemist's assistant before winning a scholarship to the prestigious Normal School of Science in London. While he is best remembered for his groundbreaking science fiction novels, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells also wrote extensively on politics and social matters and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of his day.

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⚡ Latest, 📙 GoLoPo, the Novel • 🎁 Unbox Short Stories

The Time Machine

Hello everyone! Welcome or welcome back to my blog. Today, I have for you, a book review on a stunning trendsetter. The Time Machine, written by Herbert George Wells, can be said to be one of the best examples of classic science-fiction. Widely regarded as the pioneer of the genre, H.G. Wells has not only managed to produce a first-of-its-kind story, but also one that will give prominent action thrillers a run for their money. Let us begin.

About the Author:

H.G. Wells, or Herbert George Wells, is better known as one of the most successful science-fiction writers of the 20 th Century. He was born in Bromley, England, on the 21 st of September, 1866. Wells apprenticed as a draper when he was young. He did not take to this kind of work, though. In 1883, he became a student – cum – teacher at Midhurst Grammar School.

Over there, he won a scholarship to study at the School of Science, where he was taught biology by T. H. Huxley, due to which he developed a keen interest in evolution. In the coming years, Wells wrote many major essays on science and finally became a novelist in 1895, when he wrote his first science fiction book, The Time Machine . This book became very popular and made him very popular. Three more successful novels followed it: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

Along with being a great novelist, Wells also actively supported socialism and humanitarianism. He was genuine and full of inventiveness. In his early scientific writings, Wells predicted the invention of modern weapons such as the tank and the atom bomb. Therefore, he was horrified by the outbreak of World War I and later World War II. He then wrote extensively about the need for a new world order, it was while working on a project that dealt with the dangers of nuclear war, that H. G. Wells died on the 13 th of August, 1946.

The Time Machine:

The story is navigated by The Time Traveler, who is also the narrator of the story. It is this person, who builds his own time machine and decides to travel into the future. The society, as usual, does nothing to support his apparently unconventional experiments. But he is a scientist with an inventive mind and interest in machinery. He finally succeeds in his task, and soon finds himself in the year 82701 AD.

The narrator believes that civilization will continue to advance till it reaches perfection and ultimately destroy itself. He is not very much off the mark when he arrives in the future and he discovers that society, as he knew it, has fallen into ruins, literally and metaphorically. The only reminders of mankind’s glorious past are crumbling buildings, now overgrown with vegetation. And humans are nowhere in sight. What he encounters instead, are two species much different than modern humans: the Eloi, who represent the lazy, upper class, and the Morlocks, who represent the exploited labor class.

Most of the novel speaks about the narrator’s horrendous discoveries of the divided world. But what is most amazing is the author’s imagination and genius itself. When most talk about time machine evokes the wish of visiting the path, H.G. Wells thinks of nothing but the future. The narrator in the book is unsure whether the machine will go in the past or future, but Wells decides it for him. And, coincidentally, many years later, a theory is proposed which says it is not possible to travel back in time due to the inexistence of negative energy. But if one does travel at the speed of light, one may travel to the future.

The imagination and ingenuity in this book is magnificent. And it probably will be just as interesting to action-thriller readers, as it will be (surely) to science enthusiasts. And after all is said and done, you haven’t read science fiction if you haven’t read Wells, and especially, The Time Machine.

So that is it for today, guys. I hope you found the review helpful. I really recommend you to try and read the book; especially if you are a science-fiction fan. If you don’t want to do all the hard work, you can also go for a good, abridged version. Do follow my blog if you haven’t already. Stay tuned for more such reviews. Until then, au revoir!

Movie Reviews

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"The Time Machine" is a witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing. It makes use of computer-aided graphics to create a future race of grubby underground beasties, who like the characters in "Battleship Earth" have evolved beyond the need for bathing and fingernail clippers. Since this race--the Morlocks--is allegedly a Darwinian offshoot of humans, and since they are remarkably unattractive, they call into question the theory that over a long period of time a race grows more attractive through natural selection. They are obviously the result of 800,000 years of ugly brides.

The film stars Guy Pearce as Alexander Hartdegen, a brilliant mathematician who hopes to use Einstein's earliest theories to build a machine to travel through time. He is in love with the beautiful Emma ( Sienna Guillory ), but on the very night when he proposes marriage, a tragedy happens, and he vows to travel back in time in his new machine and change the course of history.

The machine, which lacks so much as a seat belt, consists of whirling spheres encompassing a Victorian club chair. Convenient brass gauges spin to record the current date. Speed and direction are controlled by a joystick. The time machine has an uncanny ability to move in perfect synchronization with the Earth, so that it always lands in the same geographical spot, despite the fact that in the future large chunks of the moon (or all of it, according to the future race of Eloi) have fallen to the Earth, which should have had some effect on the orbit. Since it would be inconvenient if a time machine materialized miles in the air or deep underground, this is just as well.

We will not discuss paradoxes of time travel here, since such discussion makes any time travel movie impossible. Let us discuss instead an unintended journey, which Hartdegen makes to 8,000 centuries in the future, when Homo sapiens has split in two, into the Eloi and Morlocks. The Morlocks evolved underground in the dark ages after the moon's fall, and attack on the surface by popping up through dusty sinkholes. They hunt the Eloi for food. The Eloi are an attractive race of brown-skinned people whose civilization seems modeled on paintings by Rousseau; their life is an idyll of leafy bowers, waterfalls and elegant forest structures, but they are such fatalists about the Morlocks that instead of fighting them off, they all but salt and pepper themselves.

Alexander meets a beautiful Eloi woman named Mara ( Samantha Mumba ) and her sturdy young brother, befriends them and eventually journeys to the underworld to try to rescue her. This brings him into contact with the Uber-Morlock, a chalk-faced Jeremy Irons , who did not learn his lesson after playing an evil Mage named Profion in "Dungeons & Dragons." In broad outline, this future world matches the one depicted in George Pal's 1960 film "The Time Machine," although its blond, blue-eyed race of Eloi have been transformed into dusky sun people. One nevertheless tends to question romances between people who were born 800,000 years apart and have few conversations on subjects other than not being eaten. Convenient, that when humankind was splitting into two different races, both its branches continued to speak English.

The Morlocks and much of their world have been created by undistinguished animation. The Morlock hunters are supposed to be able to leap great distances with fearsome speed, but the animation turns them into cartoonish characters whose movements defy even the laws of gravity governing bodies in motion. Their movements are not remotely plausible, and it's disconcerting to see that while the Eloi are utterly unable to evade them, Irons, a professor who has scarcely left his laboratory for four years, is able to duck out of the way, bean them with big tree branches, etc.

Pearce, as the hero, makes the mistake of trying to give a good and realistic performance. Irons at least knows what kind of movie he's in, and hams it up accordingly. Pearce seems thoughtful, introspective, quiet, morose. Surely the inventor of a time machine should have a few screws loose, and the glint in his eye should not be from tears.

By the end of the movie, as he stands beside the beautiful Eloi woman and takes her hand, we are thinking, not of their future together, but about how he got from the Morlock caverns to the top of that mountain ridge in time to watch an explosion that takes only a few seconds. A Morlock could cover that distance, but not a mathematician, unless he has discovered worm holes as well.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

The Time Machine (2002)

Rated PG-13 Intense Sequences Of Action Violence

Guy Pearce as Alexander

Jeremy Irons as Uber-Morlock

Yancey Arias as Toren

Sienna Guillory as Emma

Samantha Mumba as Mara

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Directed by

Simon Wells

Based on the book by

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YouTube Kids Series ‘Tab Time’ Debuts New App, Children’s Book Series and Online Store (EXCLUSIVE)

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YouTube’s popular “ Tab Time ” series, starring “America’s mom” and Emmy-winning host Tabitha Brown, just got bigger.

Brown and creative studio Kids at Play have announced the launch of the “Tab Time World” app plus an all-new children’s book series and online shop as an expansion of the Emmy-winning young children’s series “Tab Time,” co-created by Brown and Kids at Play founder Jason Berger.

The eBooks and App, developed in partnership with Google Kids Space, will be available for free exclusively on Google Kids Space and Google Play for a limited time. Additionally, the books will be available in the “Tab Time World” app and everywhere eBooks are sold. “‘Tab Time’ is special to so many of us and expanding keeps our hearts and minds open for love to grow! Parents and kids love smart devices and to give them self-love and learning tools from ‘Tab Time’ in books and apps was in perfect alignment,” Brown says of the new offerings. “I’m excited for families to get to experience it all together! The more we gather with learning and love, the better the world will be! That’s what ‘Tab Time’ is all about and that makes me so excited.”

Popular on Variety

Brown narrates the new interactive comic picture series, which was written by “Tab Time” showrunner Sean Presant and illustrated by “Tab Time” animator Michael Scanlon. The first two books in the series are “Avi to the Rescue” and “Lenny and the Truck-Driving Dinosaurs,” each based on characters from the hybrid live-action/animated series.

Brown notes that upcoming stories in the book series will follow episodes from the YouTube series.

“The stories will piggyback off the episodes. Like when we feel afraid, or when we make a mistake, that’s really an oops-ortunity. We’re helping kids give themselves space and time to grow, learn, respect and love themselves and others,” she says.

Additionally, the show has launched an official store on shop.tabtime.tv , featuring “Tab Time” themed backpacks, shirts, hoodies, hats, bibs, onesies, sippy cups, blankets, bags and more.

“The shop is really a response to demand. When we first launched ‘Tab Time,’ parents and kids were creating their own amazing DIY-style costumes and such. So, with the shop, we are providing an official source with quality materials and fun artwork for parents and kids who want to bring the digital world of ‘Tab Time’ to their physical reality,” Berger says.

Tabitha Brown is represented by CAA and Brecheen, Feldman, Breimer, Silver & Thompson, LLP. Jason Berger is represented by UTA, Artists First and Rothenberg, Mohr and Binder, LLP. Sean Presant is repped by Nick Terry at World Builder Entertainment. “Tab Time World” was developed by Kids at Play and Space Inch.

Watch a visual tour about the new “Tab Time World” app below.

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Libraries are full of books about great cats. This one is special.

Caleb carr’s memoir, ‘my beloved monster,’ is a heart-rending tale of human-feline connection.

Over the years, my wife and I have been blessed with 15 cats, three rescued from the streets of Brooklyn, three from barns near our home in Vermont, one from a Canadian resort and the others from the nearby shelter, where my wife has volunteered as a “cat whisperer” for the most emotionally scarred of its feline inhabitants for years. Twelve of our beloved pets have died (usually in our arms), and we could lose any of our current three cats — whose combined age is roughly 52 — any day now. So, I am either the best person to offer an opinion on Caleb Carr’s memoir, “ My Beloved Monster ,” or the worst.

For the many who have read Carr’s 1994 novel, “The Alienist,” an atmospheric crime story set in 19th-century New York, or watched the Netflix series it inspired, Carr’s new book might come as something of a surprise. “My Beloved Monster” is a warm, wrenching love story about Carr and his cat, a half-wild rescue named Masha who, according to the subtitle of his book, in fact rescued Carr. The author is, by his own admission, a curmudgeon, scarred by childhood abuse, living alone and watching his health and his career go the way of all flesh.

What makes the book so moving is that it is not merely the saga of a great cat. Libraries are filled with books like that, some better than others. It’s the 17-year chronicle of Carr and Masha aging together, and the bond they forged in decline. (As Philip Roth observed, “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”) He chronicles their lives, beginning with the moment the animal shelter begs Carr to bring the young lioness home because the creature is so ferocious she unnerves the staff — “You have to take that cat!” one implores.

Interspersed throughout Carr’s account of his years with Masha are his recollections of all the other cats he has had in his life, going back to his youth in Manhattan. And there are a lot. Cats often provided him comfort after yet another torment his father, the writer Lucien Carr , and stepfather visited upon him. Moreover, Carr identifies so deeply with the species that as a small child he drew a self-portrait of a boy with a cat’s head. He knows a great deal about cats and is eager to share his knowledge, for instance about the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of their mouths that helps them decide if another creature is predator or prey. His observations are always astute: “Dogs tend to trust blindly, unless and until abuse teaches them discretion. … Cats, conversely, trust conditionally from the start.”

Carr, now 68, was a much younger man when he adopted Masha. Soon, however, they were joined at the hip. As the two of them bonded, the writer found himself marveling at what he believed were their shared childhood traumas, which move between horrifying and, in Carr’s hands, morbidly hilarious: “I began to accept my father’s behavior in the spirit with which he intended it … he was trying to kill me.” Man and cat shared the same physical ailments, including arthritis and neuropathy, possibly caused by physical violence in both cases. Carr allowed Masha, a Siberian forest cat, to go outside, a decision many cat owners may decry, but he defends it: “Masha was an entirely different kind of feline,” and keeping her inside “would have killed her just as certainly as any bear or dog.” Indeed, Masha took on fishers and bears (yes, bears!) on Carr’s wooded property in Upstate New York.

But bears and dogs are humdrum fare compared with cancer and old age, which come for both the novelist and his cat. Carr’s diagnosis came first, and his first concern was whether he would outlive Masha. (The existence of the book gives us the answer he didn’t have at the time.) Illness adds new intensity to the human-feline connection: “Coming back from a hospital or a medical facility to Masha was always particularly heartening,” Carr writes, “not just because she’d been worried and was glad to see me, but because she seemed to know exactly what had been going on … and also because she was so anxious to show that she hadn’t been scared, that she’d held the fort bravely.”

Sometimes, perhaps, Carr anthropomorphizes too much and exaggerates Masha’s language comprehension, or gives her more human emotion than she had. But maybe not. Heaven knows, I see a lot behind my own cats’ eyes. Moreover, it’s hard to argue with a passage as beautiful as this: “In each other’s company, nothing seemed insurmountable. We were left with outward scars. … But the only wounds that really mattered to either of us were the psychic wounds caused by the occasional possibility of losing each other; and those did heal, always, blending and dissolving back into joy.”

Like all good memoirs — and this is an excellent one — “My Beloved Monster” is not always for the faint of heart. Because life is not for the faint of heart. But it is worth the emotional investment, and the tissues you will need by the end, to spend time with a writer and cat duo as extraordinary as Masha and Carr.

Chris Bohjalian is the best-selling author of 24 books. His most recent novel, “The Princess of Las Vegas,” was published last month.

My Beloved Monster

Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me

By Caleb Carr

Little, Brown. 435 pp. $29

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'The Spiderwick Chronicles' Review: A Horror Spin on a Classic Series

This adaptation of the books by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi is for a whole new generation.

The Big Picture

Roku's The Spiderwick Chronicles stands on its own without needing viewers to be previously familiar with the book series.
The entire cast turns in great performances, and the visual effects are remarkable and realistic.
The level of horror feels inconsistent with the younger tone of the series at times, and the Grace family conflict gets drawn out in occasionally frustrating ways.

It's been a long time coming for fans of The Spiderwick Chronicles , as the series finally makes its long-awaited debut this week. Just under a year ago, the completed series was dropped by Disney+ before thankfully being acquired by the Roku Channel . The series, all eight episodes of which are available to stream starting April 19, is a terrific young adult fantasy adventure that incorporates just enough horror elements to keep things interesting. Under showrunner Aron Eli Coleite and director Kat Coiro , it updates the story where necessary, but most importantly, never loses sight of the spirit of the Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi book series on which it is based.

The Spiderwick Chronicles (2024)

Follows the Grace family as they move from Brooklyn, New York, to their ancestral home in Henson, Michigan, the Spiderwick Estate.

What Is 'The Spiderwick Chronicles' About?

In The Spiderwick Chronicles , twins Simon ( Noah Cottrell ) and Jared ( Lyon Daniels ) move with their sister Mallory ( Mychala Lee ) and their mother Helen ( Joy Bryant ) to their ancestral home, Spiderwick. The Grace family is seeking a fresh start , and more importantly, seeking help for Jared, who has been getting into trouble at school with increasingly concerning behavior. There is a specialist in the area, Dr. Brauer, that Helen is hopeful will be able to get to the root of Jared's problems.

Fortunately, for those who are not familiar with the original book series — or those who, like me, read them two decades ago and don't remember much beyond broad strokes — Roku's The Spiderwick Chronicles doesn't rely on any pre-existing knowledge of the story. There are no gaps in the narrative where the writers hope the audience's memory will fill in the blanks. For all that it is based on the world first created by Black and DiTerlizzi, The Spiderwick Chronicles stands remarkably on its own as a fantasy series.

'The Spiderwick Chronicles' Leans Into More Horror Than the Books

The original Spiderwick books follow a plot that eventually pieces together, so the reader can see how the seemingly separate events were part of a larger story, but the wisest decision the series makes is to do away with the episodic format of the books in favor of a serialized story . Rather than confronting the beings from the "invisible world" in a creature-of-the-week style adventure, the Grace siblings have one mystery to unravel — the secrets of their Great Aunt Lucinda ( Charlayne Woodard ), the field guide written by her father Arthur Spiderwick ( Albert Jones ), and the boggart named Thimbletack ( Jack Dylan Grazer ), who lives in their house. At the same time, the threat from Mulgarath ( Christian Slater ) and his associate Calliope ( Alyvia Alyn Lind ) continues to grow, folding into the siblings' struggles.

As far as villains go, Slater's Mulgarath is equal parts menacing and smooth. His character comes from the tradition of villains where the means might be gruesome — and they are gruesome , more on that momentarily — but it's easy to understand why he feels this is his only option. He's not a villain for the sake of villainy, but rather, like all the best-written ones, a villain whose motivations are clear. He is scary in how not-scary he is, through how he draws his victims in with mild manners and smiles. The chemistry Slater shares with Bryant's Helen is also palpable and puts an interesting, more grown-up spin on one of the plot points from the book, letting the actor make full use of that leading-man charm he's exhibited for decades.

That more grown-up approach really is the defining trait of the series as a whole. The Grace siblings are all aged up from their book counterparts, and more embedded with their local peers. With older protagonists, too, comes the ability to tell more grown-up stories, and lean harder into the horror side of things which the show embraces with a gleeful enthusiasm — between this and The Last of Us , I am never looking at a mushroom again — and some stunning special effects and make-up work. While the show's elements never fully crossed the line into proper body horror territory, they were definitely bumping up against the boundaries of my admittedly low horror tolerance and sometimes felt jarring against the younger tone of the rest of the story.

'The Spiderwick Chronicles' Strongest Focus Is on the Grace Family, for Better or Worse

If there is one thing I often find grating about sibling dynamics on-screen, it's when they don't behave in a way that any real siblings would. Admittedly, that's a hard line to walk. I'd need about 20 minutes to explain any one of my inside jokes with my brother, and that kind of thing isn't conducive to good TV. Instead, The Spiderwick Chronicles chooses to bake the Grace sibling dynamics into the fabric of the larger plot going on. They love each other, that much is obvious, and they want to support each other, but they aren't always necessarily kind to one another. Simon and Mallory love Jared and want him to get better, but are equally frustrated and resentful that his struggles are the reason they had to leave home in the first place. For his part, Jared grows increasingly frustrated that as supernatural things unfold around him, his family doesn't seem to ever really hear him or believe him.

This is an interesting approach to the conversation around mental health , as many can relate to the experience of being unable to express the true scope of one's thoughts to those who ostensibly want to help. But unfortunately, this also becomes a source of frustration for the audience. It would be one thing if Jared were the only one who witnessed and experienced the supernatural goings-on. But he isn't, which means it's very frustrating to watch his family continually insist that this is because he's troubled and lashing out, instead of attributing it to the supernatural events they have also witnessed. That said, the show does add a compelling subplot about mental health care and the way people weaponize that care against the people who need it most. It also allows the three siblings to have subplots and interests of their own, building them into three distinct characters with their own motivations , as opposed to a generic group of kids with little more than a single descriptor to differentiate them.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is an excellent example of how to take beloved source material and adapt it for a new generation and demographic. Though it does stumble in places, the series is overall satisfying and self-contained — with space for another season, should it get renewed — and is an adventure worth watching , either for younger viewers looking for a slightly more grown-up tale or older audiences who enjoy their adventures with a nostalgic feel.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is an engaging adaptation of the popular series that ups the horror and the family drama.

The series stands on its own and doesn't rely on previous familiarity with the books.
The entire cast turns in great performances.
The visual effects are remarkable and realistic.
The tone of the horror feels inconsistent in places.
The family conflict gets drawn out in sometimes frustrating ways.

The Spiderwick Chronicles premieres on Roku on April 19.

Watch on Roku

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The Time Machine Review
The Time Machine Review: 'The Time Machine' is a classic masterwork of the science fiction genre that details the tale of an adventuring scientist who voyages several hundred thousand years into the future following his invention of a device capable of maneuvering the dimensions of time.This century-old book never gets stale yet it's one that offers the reader a free rollercoaster ride ...
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
(Book 797 from 1001 books) - The Time Machine, H.G. Wells The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895 and written as a frame narrative. ... As mentioned at the beginning of this review, time-travel narratives have become a familiar thing in our, well, time.
Book Review: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Time Machine seems to compare favorably with mainstream literature of its day. When compared with more modern novels, science fiction or otherwise, parts of it seem a bit quaint and stuffy. Still, Wells was a good writer and the novel has a sense of wonder; it's a fine adventure tale. On the surface, the circumstances and science sound ...
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Published: The Time Machine was published in 1895 as a serial novel. Literary Period: Victorian Period. Point of View: H.G. Wells deploys a first-person narrator called Hillyer. However, the story is almost entirely told by the time traveller as a first-person account of his trip to the future. Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Thriller.
Book Review: The Time Machine by HG Wells
The Time Machine is the type of book that one could dissect for days, and remains surprisingly relevant today. Those very same questions regarding the role of science, the distribution of work and knowledge, of the origins and definition of humanity, and on notions of class and capitalism echo around us today, making for some interesting, and ...
The Time Machine by HG Wells
Recommendations from our site. "This is the novel that inaugurated time travel as a sub-genre. Wells picked up the up-to-date (in the 1890s) scientific speculation about time being a fourth dimension, and ran with it, imagining a machine that could take a man backwards and forwards through time….It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it ...
The Time Machine: Notes Towards an Analysis of Wells's Novella
In this week's Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting appeal of H. G. Wells's first great 'scientific romance'. In some ways, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) is a 'timeless' text: it continues to enjoy huge popularity (as witnessed by big film adaptations in 1960 and 2002, as well as the fact that the novel itself has never been out of ...
Book Review: "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells, Illustrated by
Illustrated by artists Ale + Ale, the world of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is brought vividly to life in this edition from Rockport Publishers' new Classics Reimagined series. The story, recounted by an unnamed narrator, tells the tale of the Time Traveller, whose invention leads him to the year 802,701 AD.
REVIEW: The Time Machine
With a speculative leap that still fires the imagination, Wells sends his brave explorer to face a future burdened with our greatest hopes… and our darkest fears. A pull of the Time Machine's lever propels him to the age of a slowly dying Earth. There he discovers two bizarre races - the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks - who ...
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Time Machine was H.G. Wells' first published novel and it was a development of his previous story The Chronic Argonauts which was first aired in the Science School Journal that he edited as an undergraduate. To me the writing lacked the colourful grammar and language of his later works and at 107 pages it is definitely on the brief side.
HG Wells' The Time Machine reviewed
HG Wells' The Time Machine reviewed - archive, 1895. 11 June 1895 The time traveller's revelations are unlikely to excite regret on the part of his readers at having been born 802,000 years too ...
The Time Machine
The Time Machine is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, ... In his 1931 preface to the book, Wells wrote that The Time Machine seemed "a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, ... A section from the thirteenth chapter of the serial published in New Review (May 1895, partway down p. 577 to p. 580, ...
Review: The Time Machine
The Time Machine is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1895 and written as a frame narrative. Wells is generally credited with the popularization of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term "time machine" was coined by Wells and is ...
The Time Machine Themes and Analysis
The time traveller zooms into the future to the year 802, 701 AD parking in a hailstorm by the giant white sphinx and is arrested by creatures called Eloi. His captors mistake him for a God and instead of incarcerating him, shower him with beautiful flowers and organize a banquet for him at their biggest building.
The Time Machine
The Time Machine, first novel by H. G. Wells, published in book form in 1895. The novel is considered one of the earliest works of science fiction and the progenitor of the " time travel " subgenre. SUMMARY: Wells advanced his social and political ideas in this narrative of a nameless Time Traveller who is hurtled into the year 802,701 by ...
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
ISBN - 978-81-7599-295-5. Pages - 143. My Review -. H.G Wells is the Shakespeare of science fiction. After watching the series Time After Time on Amazon Prime, I decided to read The Time Machine and other works by the author. Plot - It is the story of a Time Traveller who designed a time machine. One day, while working, he travels into the year ...
The Time Machine
The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller.The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension.He then reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person, and returns at dinner the following week to recount a ...
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells Plot Summary
The Time Machine is a work of science-fiction that imagines how the social conditions of Victorian England have evolved in the year 802,701. The story opens on a dinner party at the home of an eminent scientist, the Time Traveller, who is explaining to his assembled guests (including the narrator telling the story) principles of science and math that support the possibility of traveling across ...
"The Time Machine" Book Review
"The Time Machine," penned by H. G. Wells, is an enduring piece of science fiction literature that firmly cemented Wells's place as a pioneer of the genre. Skip to content. NATALIA'S BOOKHOUSE "The Time Machine" Book Review. July 31, 2023
Amazon.com: The Time Machine: 9780553213515: Wells, H.G.: Books
The Time Machine. Mass Market Paperback - January 1, 1984. by H.G. Wells (Author) 664. See all formats and editions. When the Time Traveller courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700—and everything had changed. In this unfamiliar, utopian age creatures seemed to dwell together in ...
The Time Machine
The Time Machine, written by Herbert George Wells, can be said to be one of the best examples of classic science-fiction. Widely regarded as the pioneer of the genre, H.G. Wells has not only managed to produce a first-of-its-kind story, but also one that will give prominent action thrillers a run for their money. Let us begin.
The Time Machine Book Review and Ratings by Kids
The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception. Publisher: Independently published. ISBN-13: 9798606180929. ISBN-10: 8606180920. Published on 1/29/2020. Binding: Paperback. Number of pages: 123. The Time Machine has 8 reviews and 3 ratings. Reviewer Glory wrote: "It's mind blowing".
The Time Machine movie review (2002)
"The Time Machine" is a witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing. It makes use of computer-aided graphics to create a future race of grubby underground beasties, who like the characters in "Battleship Earth" have evolved beyond the need for bathing and fingernail clippers. Since this race--the Morlocks--is allegedly a Darwinian ...
'Tab Time' Debuts App, Children's Book Series and Online Store
YouTube's popular "Tab Time" series, starring "America's mom" and Emmy-winning host Tabitha Brown, just got bigger. Brown and creative studio Kids at Play have announced the launch of ...
Review of "My Beloved Monster," a memoir by Caleb Carr
For the many who have read Carr's 1994 novel, "The Alienist," an atmospheric crime story set in 19th-century New York, or watched the Netflix series it inspired, Carr's new book might come ...
'The Spiderwick Chronicles' Review
The Spiderwick Chronicles is an engaging adaptation of the popular series that ups the horror and the family drama. 7 10. Pros. The series stands on its own and doesn't rely on previous ...

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The Time Machine: Notes Towards an Analysis of Wells’s Novella

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Book Review: “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, Illustrated by Alessandro Lecis and Alessandra Panzeri

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The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – Book Review

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HG Wells' The Time Machine reviewed - archive, 1895

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Themes and Analysis

The Time Machine Themes

Humanity Extinction and Universe’s Endures

Capitalism, A Working Time Bomb

Technology and Progress Strive

Generosity And Affection

A Depiction Of Social Class And Inequality

Analysis of Key Moments in The Time Machine

Style, Tone, And Figurative Language Of The Time Machine

Figurative Language

Narrative Point Of View

Analysis of Symbols in The Time Machine

The White Sphinx

Morlocks and Eloi

How does the time machine work in HG Wells’s book?

What is H.G. Wells’ time machine made of?

What are the two main stories of ‘ The Time Machine ?’

Why are the Eloi Afraid of the Dark?

Why is Wells’ ‘ The Time Machine ‘ Very Critical of Marx’s Capitalism?

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