El futuro es incierto. Esta obviedad ha existido desde tiempos inmemoriales y se ha convertido en objeto de estudio e hipótesis para las generaciones que han tratado de explicar el avance de la humanidad. A finales del siglo XIX, muchos escritores empezaron a novelizar su visión del futuro con historias que a día de hoy aún resultan fascinantes y, en muchos casos, premonitorias. En este periodo se considera históricamente a Jules Verne y a H.G. Wells como precursores de la ciencia ficción europea. Mientras que el primero ofrecía un análisis más técnico y científico, el segundo estaba enfocado en las consecuencias sociales del progreso de la humanidad.

En La máquina del tiempo, un científico explica a un grupo de amigos su intención de viajar en el tiempo gracias a una máquina que está construyendo y que se encuentra en su fase final de puesta en marcha. Consigue finalizar todos los preparativos y viajar hasta el año 802.701, en el que se encontrará con dos especies distintas: los Eloi y los Morlocks.

Wells mueve los hilos en una batalla entre el pesimismo y la esperanza, enviando un mensaje de advertencia que sigue siendo tan prioritario como hace más de cien años. Una sociedad dormida, decadente y despreocupada de su entorno se puede convertir en una sociedad abocada al fracaso. El autor era muy consciente de la importancia que tenía el esfuerzo y la superación de obstáculos a nivel individual para conseguir una sociedad inteligente, preparada y autosuficiente. Cualquier acto que suponga la supresión de responsabilidades para un determinado sector o clase social (en contraposición de una mayor presión y explotación de otros grupos) estará condenado a un futuro oscuro.

Con muy pocas páginas, La máquina del tiempo se convierte así en un gran tratado social sobre las diferencias de clases que utiliza la ciencia ficción de forma muy inteligente para poder demostrar comportamientos y actitudes en el ser humano que no encajarían en ambientes más costumbristas o realistas. Se podría considerar que fue uno de los puntos de partida con los que poder hablar de la sociedad actual a partir de situaciones y puntos de vista completamente innovadores.

Actualmente se pueden encontrar novelas del género mucho más elaboradas, con una base científica mejor desarrollada e incluso con una crítica social más mordaz. Aun así, este primer trabajo de Wells mantiene un buen ritmo durante toda la novela, no hace uso de grandes tecnicismos que puedan ralentizar el desarrollo de la historia y, por encima de todo, ofrece una visión de la evolución del ser humano que parece que no ha cambiado tras tantos años y, lamentablemente, parece que no cambiará en los próximos.

The Time Traveler invites over his friends and tells them of his theories about time traveling. The next day when his friend returns he stumbles in late and then tells them a tale about his journey through time. I really admired the writing though it may be dry or dense for some, I think I've been reading long enough that it wasn't too much of an effort to read through this one. The premise was interesting and I was anxious for the Time Traveler when he was recounting his journey to get back to the present so the story did draw me in. Some of the social commentary felt quite questionable and pessimistic though. I enjoyed reading it though, it's not very long and it was interesting. Towards the end of the Time Traveler's journey I got a little bored but the ending was really good, I appreciate an open ended ending that lets you keep imagining what happened.

I chose to listen to this on LibriVox, read by Mark Nelson and I'm in awe—of this wonderful story and of Nelson's narration.

Written in 1895, The Time Machine is narrated by a man who details the accounts of a Time Traveller he knew, in the most captivating way. I have a feeling that if I had read a physical copy, I'd have given it a 3 or a 4 out of 5. But listening to the audiobook somehow enhanced the experience for me and I can find nothing to criticize.

Highly recommend!

The Time Machine is not primarily a novel about time travel, time travel paradoxes and so forth. It is chiefly a speculation on the far future of humanity and, closer to home, about class conflict and the evolution of the industrial civilisation.

It starts as an almost casual chat by the fireside about the possibility of travelling through the fourth dimension and the invention of the machine — oddly described as an ordinary bicycle that can go through time. The “Time Traveller” (he is never named) then pays a visit to the human race of the year 802,701 and discovers what, at first, looks like a utopia: the descendants of the human race seem to live, in perfect harmony, comfortable lives in a garden full of flowers. But as the night comes, a disturbing reality soon replaces this vision... The end of the story is an unsettling flight to Earth’s most remote and crepuscular future. Finally, the Time Traveller disappears, leaving but a few flowers on his desk.

This novella (some 60 pages) is a seminal work of the science-fiction genre. It remains to this day a landmark that has influenced almost all the utopian or dystopian writers, from Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, to Huxley’s Brave New World, to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, to Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, to Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.

Edit: Watched the 2002 film remake, directed by Simon Wells (one of the author's descendants, apparently). This is a somewhat faithful adaptation of the book, yet a quite average movie overall. Most scenes are imitations of Indiana Jones’s tropes: an awkward academic / action hero, an ancient library, some exotic places, a couple of attractive ladies, a gloomy cavern, a heap of skeletons, a melting face. The Morlock are quite ridiculous — around the same time, Peter Jackson included Orcs into his Fellowship of the Ring that were way more convincing. The machine itself, designed like a lighthouse lamp, and the time-lapse sequences are the only unexpected and exciting elements of this film.

I first read the Time Machine as a teenager, more than 40 years ago now. I remembered it as an exciting adventure story, and I had particularly enjoyed the gradual way the Time Traveller came to understand the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks. I decided to read it again to see whether my opinion had changed.

It’s a mainly downbeat novel. The world of 802,701 A.D. turns out to be not at all what the Time Traveller had expected. Later he travels forward to the far future and almost to the end of life on Earth.

Rather than describe such a well-known story I thought I would highlight a couple of the themes that struck me on this reading. One was Darwinism. At the beginning, the narrator describes the dinner parties thrown by the Time Traveller, and how during the after-dinner conversations “some particular topic would triumph by a kind of natural selection”. Later he ponders on the physical frailty and lack of intelligence of the Eloi, and concludes these arise from a lack of challenge, “For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well-equipped as the strong, indeed, are no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet.”

The other theme was the class conflict of Wells’ time. When the Time Traveller first arrives, he climbs a hill for a view of the society of the Eloi, and his first thought is “communism”. It turns out though that class conflict still exists, in a weirdly mutated form. When I first read the book all those years ago, I wholeheartedly shared the Time Traveller’s horror of the Morlocks. I felt the same on my second reading, although thinking rationally, the Morlocks did not choose their fate, and have no other way to live.

If you haven’t read the book, it’s worth doing so. It’s very short and can easily be read in few hours.

Published in 1895, this is considered a groundbreaking classic. The time machine - part of the appeal of this is that it doesn't propose the science, it just concentrates on the outcome! It does give a tidy description of the 4 dimensions at the beginning. There is also a lot of speculation on what has occurred between present time and the year 802,701, where the story is set for the most part.

I also enjoyed the ending, and thought that fitting - although I won't spoil it here.

The writing is overly wordy, and with clunky prose - as you might expect from a late 19th Century novel, and some of the speculation is easily skimmed over, but in principle this is a significant book which influenced the genre of time travel.

A solid 3 old fashioned stars.

Every one of his books I've read I've really enjoyed, and there's no exception with The Time Machine.

His stories I find were fast-paced, plot-driven and pioneering.

I also find that the ones I've read have been unique 'basic' plots with not much character development and with the fast-paced writing you're left with wanting more.

He sets out these basic plots of, alien invasion, time travel and invisibility which are timeless and can be expanded upon.

It's no wonder he's one of the most influential and greatest science fiction writers of all time.

I read this story in 1962, after Miss Stearns (of blessed memory) read some Wells to us kids in seventh grade. Wow.

I had suddenly had picked up the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Bug.

BIG time!

That was when my disease - reading - got terminal, with this one book which Mom brought to me at age eleven (invalidated for a week with a head cold) from our Police Village public library which she ran.

Can you imagine, my MOM (bless her, too, in the hereafter, Lord) purposefully gave me a terminal disease?

***

No joke - I'm now, at 74, slowly Dying from it!

Used to be music I constantly used to crave as the drug of choice to take upstairs for naptime - now it's my Kindle. I just can't stop reading!

But it's gotten even worse.

Because When you're reading time stops. That means I'm now in Wells' story as the main character. Time stops and light turns grey when you're hurtling thru time, Wells tells us.

That's where my soulmate of 47 years and I are now.

Grey power rules! Wells was right - time flies when you're having fun.

And reading is still the most fun I've had in years.

We're even morphing in tune with our years, as Wells says - we're turning into Elois, gosh darn it. We snack on healthy food, and less of it.

A banquet is way too much! And we avoid fleshly things, like the Good Book says. And the bad folk - Morlocks all - are meanwhile morphing into subterranean creepy crawlies.

Holy moley! Did I just say The Time Machine is a CHRISTIAN book, too?

***

Yes.

I did.

"In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters."

What a classic, wonderfully imaginative science fiction sentence.

I had read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine many years ago. I remembered enjoying it, and thinking there were some creepy elements to the story. And since that was all I remembered, I decided I needed to revisit this. I'm on a mission to read or reread classic science fiction and horror writers, so I used that as an excuse to bump The Time Machine to the top of my Read List.

The story is engrossing, and despite the fact that it was published in 1895, the future vision of the Earth is, I believe, entirely within the bounds of science fiction relevance. In other words, nothing in the future Wells describes comes across as campy, super-versions of 19th Century technology (no super trains or odd flying contraptions). In fact, the only thing that stuck out to me in his far-future story is a rotting library. By itself that isn't so strange, but in light of today's digital readers, such a thing gives us book lovers a comfort that our beloved medium survived well into Well's future.

I also enjoyed the braininess of the main character, called simply the Time Traveler. Although a bit old fashioned and class-heavy, it's interesting to see our protagonist use his contemporary understanding of social-political struggle to try and understand the world he is exploring, and then to learn how far short his early analysis actually was. I liked the fact that the Time Traveler thought he had certain truths worked out early on, only to stand corrected the more he learned.

I don't remember this being so short. I wish that there was more to this story (the paperback is about 100 or so pages, and only 61 pages in my hardbound collection). Such intelligent story telling could easily have provided more for the reader. But I can't fault the story itself. A wonderful read, and a must read for any fan of the genre.

There is a tendency to regard evolution as progress, rather than merely change. In common speech, we use ‘evolve’ metaphorically for changes that we regard as progressive. Wells reminds us that evolution makes creatures better adapted to their environment, but not necessarily better in any human – that is, moral – sense. The Morlocks are well adapted to their environment. They are a Darwinian success story. But no one reads The Time Machine this way. We read it as a moral horror story.

I have had a long relationship with this book. In childhood, I read the Magnum edition with cover art by Harry Scharre. Naturally the art from my first book is the one that influenced my perception of the novel. It shows the time traveler – suit unruffled – with a tall green-gowned woman who looks nothing like Weena ought to look. They stand before ruins with a red sun blazing low on the horizon.

The Time Machine is like three stories in one. On my first reading, it was the first and third of these stories that most interested me. I was riveted by the time traveler’s lecture on time. I wanted to learn more about the fourth dimension. I was also fascinated by the vision of earth as a dying world. I never questioned the time traveler’s decision to press ever forward in time, to witness the end, or as near to the end as he could witness and live to talk about.

Those two stories make up only a small part of the novel. Most of the book is the story of the time traveler’s adventures among the Eloi and the Morlocks. The allegory was wasted on my adolescent self, for I read this part of the book as little more than the story of the hero’s escape from a race of grotesque subterranean cannibals.

Since I was cavalier with my books back then, I no longer owned the Magnum edition when the spirit moved me to read it again. My second reading was the Bantam Classics edition with one of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical landscapes on the cover. Much as I love Giorgio de Chirico, his deserted Italian piazza does not convey the setting or the mood of The Time Machine. The architecture may be right, but the emptiness is not.

This time, I’m reading the Tor edition with cover art by Les Edwards. The emphasis here is on the scientist and his machine. I dislike this cover with its nineteenth century mad scientist vibe. The machine is just a vehicle for transporting the time traveler to the future – a literal vehicle for the time traveler and a literary vehicle for Wells. It might just as well be magic. There is not even a flux capacitor to give the illusion of technology. The science in this science fiction story is human evolution.

The main story in The Time Machine is the middle story, the story that excites our emotions, not our intellect. Over time, I have evolved a greater appreciation for this part of the book. It is summed up for me in that painting by Harry Scharre. A lecture on time would not make for an evocative image. A beach full of giant crabs would miss the point altogether. The red sun and black sky are enough to suggest the end of the world. Scharre gives us the time traveler himself, standing before the ruined museum, arms wide in a gesture that says “What have we done?” For nature is not to blame.

"Decidí subir a la cumbre de una colina, a una milla y media de allí, desde donde podría tener una amplia vista de este, nuestro planeta, en el año de gracia 802.701 d. C. Porque era, como debería haberlo explicado, la fecha que los pequeños cuadrantes de mi máquina señalaban".

Una reunión entre varias personas de distintas ocupaciones. Un médico, un psicólogo, un señor llamado Filby, un hombre joven, un alcalde y... un Viajero a través del Tiempo. En la reunión se comienza a disertar sobre la matemática, la cuarta Dimensión, diversas teorías del Espacio y del Tiempo hasta que el Viajero a través del Tiempo les anuncia a los demás que ha construido una máquina para viajar al futuro.
A partir de ese punto, todo cambia, la conversación se concentra en lo que este enigmático científico tiene para contar y culminar en una demostración de que la máquina en el tiempo ha sido construida por él y como prueba de ello, los convoca a una nueva reunión.
Sorprendentemente, descubren que tarda en llegar y lo ven aparecer con su ropa hecha jirones, sin calzado, lastimado y hambriento. Es momento de descubrir qué tiene para contar. Lo que les confiesa, es que ha activado su máquina y ha viajado al año... ¡802.701!
Con la vuelta del Viajero a través del Tiempo al presente, todos los comensales están a punto de escuchar una historia asombrosa, imposible, sorprendente y... ¿real? Bueno, para saberlo, tendremos que leer esta pequeña y genial novela de no más de ciento cincuenta páginas escrita por un escritor brillante y visionario llamado Herbert George Wells.
Quién no ha soñado alguna vez con viajar en el tiempo... Cuántas películas y series se han hecho al respecto y cómo sigue apasionando este tema a mucha gente.
Muchos lo ven como irrealizable. Otros, dentro del campo científico siguen pensando que es posible en un futuro muy lejano y una gran parte de los escépticos lo ven como una fantasía que solo vive en la mente de los soñadores.
Este libro supone un gran salto en el tiempo, pero cuando el Viajero a través del Tiempo arriba al año 802.701 se encontrará con un futuro aterrador. En donde antes había seres humanos, ahora existen dos especies: los Eloi, que son casi etéreos, frágiles y sumamente dóciles y los Morlocks, extraños habitantes que viven en cavernas, con enormes ojos blancos como los peces de las profundidades del océano y de piel fría y viscosa.
Cuando el Viajero a través del Tiempo comienza a narrar lo que le sucede, instantáneamente me acordé de otro personaje perdido en un mundo completamente distinto. Me refiero a Gulliver, del libro de Jonathan Swift, ya que a Gulliver le sucede algo muy parecido con la experiencia del Viajero a través del Tiempo: desconcierto, azoramiento, desorientación y una inquietud acerca de cómo podrá salir de las situaciones en las que está involucrado. Gulliver no sabe cómo proceder en el reino de Brobdingnag, pues al ser de tamaño diminuto, siente que está en riesgo.
Mientras que en su tercer viaje cuando conoce los dominios de Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdi y Luggnagg, se encuentra con esa raza de laputienses que son prácticamente como las de verdaderos extraterrestres. Lo mismo experimenta el Viajero a través del Tiempo, porque continuamente se siente amenazado cada vez que se cruza con los Morlocks.
La diferencia entre la naturaleza de los Eloi y los Morlocks también se condice con lo que sucede en el cuarto viaje de Gulliver a las tierras de los houyhnhnms, que son una raza de caballos con inteligencia que dominan a otros seres inferiores, en estado bruto llamados yahoos, que son muy inferiores aunque parecidos a los humanos, esclavizados por una raza de monos dotados de una inteligencia avanzada, con la salvedad de que ni Eloi ni Morlocks se dominan, pero son completamente distintos.
Puedo afirmar que encubierta en esa diferencia Eloi/Morlocks, Wells hace un alegato en contra de las grandes diferencias sociales que existían en Inglaterra en el siglo XIX. Hasta lo establece a modo de reflexión filosófica cuando los compara con capitalistas y clase obrera:
"Me parecía claro como la luz del día que la extensión gradual de las actuales diferencias meramente temporales y sociales entre el capitalista y el trabajador era la clave de la situación entera. Sin duda les parecerá a ustedes un tanto extraño... y, sin embargo, aún existen hoy circunstancias que señalan ese camino."
Wells disfraza esas similitudes y diferencias utilizando un recurso narrativo ambientado en futuro muy lejano, pero que no deja de ser una crítica social muy fuerte y un claro mensaje de advertencia sobre los avances de la ciencia y el dilema de la ética:
"Los Eloi, como los reyes carolingios, habián llegado a ser tan solo unas lindas inutilidades. Poseían toda la Tierra por consentimiento tácito, desde que los Morlocks, subterráneos hacía innumerables generaciones, habían llegado a encontrar intolerable la superficie iluminada por el sol."
Este autor ve de manera muy pesimista el futuro si realmente no se hacen bien las cosas. La ciencia puede avanzar a pasos exponenciales, pero el ser humano en su esencia no cambia y puede torcer su destino hacia el mal en vez del bien.
Considero que esta novela es en cierta forma una distopía. Tal vez, no al extremo de "1984" o "Fahrenheit 451", pero encierra la idea del futuro no deseado.
Seguramente encontraremos afinidades con la naturaleza de esta novela con el significado el término "Distopía": "Término opuesto a utopía. Como tal, designa un tipo de mundo imaginario, recreado en la literatura o el cine, que se considera indeseable. La palabra distopía se forma con las raíces griegas δυσ (dys), que significa ‘malo’, y τόπος (tópos), que puede traducirse como ‘lugar’."
El debate acerca de lo distópico en "La máquina del tiempo" queda abierto.

2019 re-read.

One of my favorites from HS (more than 30 years ago) this did not time travel as well as I remembered but still a good read and to consider his vision when writing (first published in 1895) this was steampunk before there was steampunk.

The dodgy old guys huddled up listening to the dusty time traveler relate his story was a popular vehicle back then (see Joseph Conrad) but still works well, even if the language is stilted and overly formal.

What I recall best and what still thrills are the Morlocks and of course my perception is skewed by the 2002 Simon Wells film starring Jeremy Irons as the Uber-Morlock. While the film divulged from HG Wells vision as far as the Morlocks are concerned, the idea that humanity splits after 800,000 years into the peaceful but dimwitted Eloi and the bestial and carnivorous under dwellers makes this far more entertaining than it would be otherwise.

Out of date and somewhat out of touch, this is still foundational SF and a must read for fans of the genre.