One will have to admit that Mr Wells was well ahead of his time. He could conceive some of the ideas that are still fresh and new and ever-widening. I enjoyed reading this when I was young and I found many new aspects when I read this recently. Science fiction's initial attempt that opened a new dimension for the authors to explore.

I probably should've read this years ago. Whilst intriguing to a certain degree, ultimately it leaves one feeling depressed. But then that is what happens to people who entertain evolutionary ideas on any level. Where is hope for the future if we are at the mercy of the elements and if there is no Higher Power controlling world events? Anything could happen if that were the case....right? Would you want to leave yourselves and your children to the determination of fate or even to successive governments who really don't have much of a clue what will happen or why....

Thank goodness we have the Bible which tells us what will happen and that there is a God who is in control. We don't need to be afraid of the future unknowns as it is all written down for us in God's Word. We won't end up as either airheaded, lighthearted, delicate beauties or as dark, underground, cannibalistic rejects as depicted in this book....unless God wills it! We can trust Him to do what is best for us and for our future eternity in heaven.

That said, it was an enjoyable read and I did want to know what happened to "The Time Traveller" at the end. But as the author died long ago, I guess I'll never find out! The book is clean; free of bad language, violence and sexual content. There are mentions of cannibalism but not in graphic detail.

How will the Earth look like 800,000 years in the future? That's a question everyone can only attempt to find an answer to, while H.G. Wells was one of the first writers who tackled the topic of time-travelling and painted a rather convincing picture of the future.

Published in 1895, the book introduces a scientist who uses a Time Machine to be transferred into the age of a slowly dying earth. Humans have been separated by time, genetics, wars and change of their habitats into two different races, the Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks. At only about 100 pages, Wells manages to delve into a lot of different topics, among which can be found the ambiguity of human natures, the mutual effects of humans on our planet and our planet on humans, as well as a profound look into what defines humanity itself.

As a dystopian story, this tale has probably been rather ground-breaking back when it was published, and some might even consider it to be the father of all time-travel romance stories. Unlike more recent publications, however, Wells doesn't lose the point of his story in describing romantic affairs and dramatic love stories, but rather delivers a fast-paced narration coated with a prose not unlike most other writing styles from the Victorian era. Since the author builds up his story from some scientific background (the inclusion of which I highly appreciated because Wells didn't leave things unexplained), it is not easy to get into it, but once the narrative gains speed, you will digest this book in the course of a few hours.

For me, the engaging writing and the adventurous atmosphere contributed a huge part to my enjoyment of the novella. His descriptions of the dying earth were fascinating and very memorable, as was the ending which surprised and depressed me simultaneously. Much has already been said about Wells' book and its contents, so I will conclude my review by saying that readers who are not afraid to read important dystopian classics should give this one a try.

"Well, we should have been reading Ellison anyway."
"But we weren't."
"Who would expect science fiction over such a classic? I mean, really."
"Doesn't change that you screwed up."
"I'm just saying, Ellison is a fine writer. That's all."
"And I'm saying; Did you read the right book this time?"
--glowers-- "It has a 'The' at the front and everything."
"Ok then."
"Ok."
.
..
...
"You didn't read the illustrated children's book, right?"
"I hate you."
"Whatever, you're up. Go on."



*speaker steps up to podium to speak*

Greetings Pantsless lads and ladies,

This month's non-crunchy classic, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, is about a tourist. That tourist. You know the one. The one no one not on the tourist board wants in their country. The one who, after spending a few scant days in a new place, thinks himself an expert on everything there is to know about that country. He knows their ills and their woes. Their joys and their struggles. He has completely absorbed all the decades of nuance contained within their social and economic structure. And of course, he is happy to tell you all about it. Our time traveler is such a tourist. That his travels are to the future changes little.

"Let me tell you about your history of oppression of the labour class," he says. "Let me tell you about the vast underground network of structures that exist in your country. I know because I saw some empty wells and a couple of towers in the distance." "Let me tell you why you turned to cannibalism. Oh, I can tell because I saw some meat on a table, so it must be human flesh." "Let me disrupt your sleep by storming through your sleeping area at night because what I need is more important than your rest." Ok, he didn't say that last one. His actions did though.

n  For I am naturally inventive, as you know.n

His actions. Oh, his actions. The tourist badgers people constantly, getting frustrated when the native peoples do not allow him to always be the center of attention. He claims some great conspiracy when his vehicle gets towed after he just parks it in the middle of the yard. He invades people's workplaces and homes uninvited. He burns down the sacred forest. And then... to top it all off, he assaults the native citizens. Those poor, legally blind Morlocks who get by mostly on touch. He just beats them. He invades their homes, and when they try to figure out who he is (by touch, because they can't see well), he kicks and punches them. Then when they are fleeing for their lives from the fire he started, he kills them. This tourist spends a few days in a new country and decides it is ok to murder the native people! It's sickening, really.

n  Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own time.n

If all of that wasn't bad enough, he even had plans to lure one of the local women back home with him. Despicable. This tourist is too dumb to bring a camera on a trip to a new land. Too dumb to bring a pencil and paper even though he calls himself a scientist. But he thinks one of the native citizens would be better off with him. And of course, through it all, he claims his own virtue.

n  
I was almost moved to begin a massacre of the helpless abominations about me, but I contained myself. n

As if not being a mass-murderer is somehow a virtue. Perhaps to this worst of all tourists, it is. But for the rest of us, not assaulting strangers is a given. And so we must prevent such tourists from coming to our country! We must protect our forests! We must protect our defenseless! We must build a wall. A wall in time! A time wall! A...

*speaker's friend rushes up and drags him off the stage*

*friend whispering furiously in his ear* "This is a book club. It's all fiction. What is wrong with you?"

*after a moment of confusion, the audience gets up for snacks before the next round of reviews from these pantsless readers:*

Evgeny, Jeff, Carmen, Ashley, Dan 2.skull, Erin, and Jess (once she finishes).

I first read The Time Machine years ago for school and thought it was fabulous. Having re-read it now as an adult who understands the era in which Wells wrote this classic and understanding a bit more about physics, I can appreciate its sheer genius. Not only is Wells one of the best, most masterful storytellers, the concepts that he wrote about with his " time machine" were used as the basis for other great sci-fi writers for years to come. The book never ages which is the sign of a true classic!

This piece of brilliance is free through Project Gutenberg and is approximately 100 pages long. It's a must read for any serious reader.

One of the most difficult courses I took in college was a class called Sociological Theory. The professor was either brilliant or a total nut, I’m still not sure, and one of the questions for our final exam was actually:

Why? (Use diagrams to support your response).

Ugh, ugh, ugh!!! I walked out of that class with a B and I kid you not, I have never worked so hard for a B in my life! I pity the one guy in my class who walked away with an A and don’t even want to think about what his social life was like during that semester because I know mine was down the tubes.

At one point, the kooky prof mentioned The Time Machine as some interesting (but not required) reading to pick up on the side. But since he already had us reading upwards of 1,000 pages a week and we were required to hand in a 7-10 page paper every Monday (just for the one class!!!!), I was like, “screw you! H.G. Wells can kiss my ass!”

And that’s the funny thing about regret. Because now I’m wishing I’d have made time in my busy schedule to read it. Maybe I should have blown off another class for a couple hours so I could have read The Time Machine. And then I could have thought about it in a state of mind that was open and receptive to what was being said and layering it with some weird, academic extrapolations and connections (the kind professors slurp up) and it would become something ultra-meaningful and profound. Or something.

But no, I read it now. At age 29. Because I was dragging my feet and didn’t feel like finishing the book I’m supposed to be reading about Al Qaeda. And so the entire time I was reading it, I was like, “hm, interesting. If I was a younger person and still remembered the specific details about theories I studied in my past life as a student, the ideas in this book would have given me a nerd brain orgasm. And hot diggity damn! This book would have made a fantastic paper for my Soc. Theory class! By referencing several schools of sociological thought and combining those with discussions of evolution, social deconstruction and combining all that with the social norms of Victorian peoples—that would have knocked that prof’s socks off!"

So anyway. I liked this book okay. I’m really not a huge science fiction fan and that aspect probably kept me from getting into it as much as I could have given its potential for creating nerd brain o’s. Plus, it was only 90 pages long. It’s hard to really get into something that’s that short. Parts of the story felt like they weren’t fleshed out enough and Wells seemed to have skimmed over several scenes that shouldn’t have been skimped on. But then I found out that his original intent for this story was to turn it into a full-fledged novel but that just never happened due to some financial burdens and it sort of made sense.

The basic plot revolves around a Victorian gentleman and his theories about time travel. To prove them, he builds a machine and travels 800,000 years into the future where he befriends a group of people, the Eloi, who are descended from modern human beings. They are much shorter, childlike people who only eat fruit and spend most of their day playing games. They have no concept of work, they have no critical thinking skills and are incapable of logical reaction to problems. They are also terrified of the dark.

After spending a few days with them, the Time Traveler discovers another distinct species, also descended from modern man but of a much more sinister nature. This second group lives underground, only comes out at night, is a bit more cunning than the gentle people who live aboveground and this group is also extremely predatory in that they cannibalize the Eloi. These are the Morlocks.

The Time Traveler has several adventures during his time spent amongst the Eloi and the Morlocks and towards the end of the story, Wells makes some fairly blatant comparisons between the Eloi and the ultra-rich of our own society. If they spend their entire days being attended to by others, they will lose the ability to care for themselves and if they’re not careful, over the course of time and evolution of the species, they could turn into the Eloi, a group of wimpy wimpsters upon whom a life of privilege has backfired.

Listened to this one on LibriVox. The language and storytelling is great. It's complex enough to be intellectually engaging, but simple enough to be listened to while doing chores around the house.

I really enjoy the style of writing from this period, so I probably liked it a lot more than if it had been written in the modern day.

Time Machine was required reading for a course I took in college about the history/evolution of science and man's place in nature. Wells' classic, along with Shelley's Frankenstein and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was written in response to the panic that ensued following Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species. People were freaked out by the idea that we evolved from "lesser creatures" and feared that if evolution explains how humans developed, then "de-eveolution" must also be a possibility. Writing from Victorian England, where the class divide is extreme, Wells contemplates the outcome of continued class divisions that result in two opposing races - the stupid, but blissful Eloi who live above ground in the sunshine, but can do little for themselves, and the devilish, underground-dwelling Morlocks who do every task necessary for the Elois' survival but also prey upon them. Wells expands upon the idea of "de-evolution" in a trippy epilogue.

So... I don't think there's any disputing that H.G. Wells was a genius and that his work was brilliant back in the day. But I just don't think that it ages all that well. Or maybe society has begun its long and inevitable evolution into the indolent beings Wells' time traveler claims that we become in roughly 800,000 years, and we don't want to think too hard about a narrative that takes some time to get to the point.

Probably at some point between the Victorian era when this was written and the year eight hundred thousand whatever, we will have started beaming storypictures directly into our brains and thus have no need for narrative any longer. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and Wells was determined to use as many of them as possible.

And so it is with maybe a tiny twinge of regret that I have to give this only 2 stars, because the narrative is where this book lost me. It was sooooooooooooooooo long and drawn out, with so many descriptions and so many needless details that my advanced future brain just wandered off in search of shiny things.

I think the premise here is pretty cool, but the actual story didn't do much for me... Usually, at least in my experience, time travelers usually go BACK in time. Either to change something, or learn something, or just accidentally. This one went forward in time. Why? Because he could, I guess. He wanted to see where humanity ends up? I don't know.

So, we find that in the year eight hundred thousand whatever that humanity has evolved along two different lines. An upper class set of Eloi, who are so advanced that they... do nothing? And the Morlocks, who have moved underground and adapted to a mole-like lifestyle. Until they ran out of food, anyway.

But, I have a coupla problems with this book. For one, I don't think that that kind of evolution would happen in less than a million years, considering how long it's taken for humans to develop from pre-human primates to where we are now.

Second... The time machine only moved through time. It stayed in the exact place it started, geographically, until it was moved by someone else. But, Earth is moving through space. Our solar system is moving through space. Our galaxy is moving through space. Everything is moving through space. If you were to jump in the air and skip a minute of time, where you land will not be where you started. It might not be far off, because it's only a minute, but it will be off. And if you were to travel eight hundred thousand whatever years in the future, the earth is no longer going to be in the same location in space. So... you probably land in the vacuum of space and die.

When Mr. Time Traveler came back, as he had to do to tell his tale, and his time machine was moved several feet or yards or whatever away, I thought to myself, "OK so we're ignoring the moving through space thing... but how lucky for him that his machine was still located within the confines of his lab. What a shame it would have been to arrive back home and end up trapped in the wall because the machine was moved one foot too far to the left. Oopsie!"

It must be a big lab.

Third, I just don't see the Morlocks as scary or disgusting or, well, anything but pitiable. They evolved along a different line, or so Mr. Time Traveler theorizes, and that made them less pretty, and thus lower class citizens relegated to the sewers and given the upper class's scraps - which only further helped along their evolutionary distancing, if we go along with dude's theory. They become less human, and more primitive, and do what they need to do to survive, as ALL life does.

But with attitudes like Mr. Time Traveler's, is it any wonder they became what they did? It's like Frankenstein's monster all over again. We create things we don't understand and then throw them away when they aren't pleasant.

I bet this was scary shit when it was written, but now? I just feel sorry for the Morlocks and think that the Eloi and Mr. Time Traveler are a bunch of dicks. Boring ones, at that.

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.

Reviewed by Clive on www.whisperingstories.com

Poți reciti o carte doar pentru a verifica un amănunt? Poți.

Ce fel de floare aduce din viitor călătorul în timp? Jorge Luis Borges a spus (și Mario Vargas Llosa a repetat) că exploratorul aduce din viitor un trandafir și că această floare anacronică reprezintă „paradigma obiectului fantastic”. Am avut o îndoială, eu știam altceva, și am deschis cartea lui H. G. Wells, a cărui biografie redactată de David Lodge, Un om făcut din bucăți, tocmai o citesc acum.

Călătorul nu se întoarce în mînă cu un trandafir ca să-și dovedească isprava. Oricine poate arăta unui grup de fani SF un trandafir (la mine în mahala costă doar 5 lei), dar asta nu înseamnă că a ajuns cu „mașina timpului” în 2021 sau în oricare alt an din afundul erelor viitoare, în 802701, să zicem, anul propus de Wells.

Călătorul aduce, de fapt, două flori necunoscute. Și nu pentru că s-a gîndit la o dovadă, ci pentru că Weena i le-a pus în buzunar: „ea a început să alerge în jurul meu, repezindu-se să culeagă flori”. În timp ce-și povestește aventura temporală, „exploratorul timpului se opri, îşi vîrî mîinile în buzunar şi puse apoi pe măsuţă două flori veştejite, care nu se deosebeau prea mult de nalbele mari, albe”.

Așadar, florile culese de Weena (imposibil de identificat) i-au rămas în buzunar printr-o întîmplare. Iar călătorul în timp nu dorește să dovedească nimănui nimic. Știe prea bine că nu va fi crezut de prieteni. Nici povestitorul nu pare să-l creadă...

Încă o dată: poți reciti o carte doar pentru a verifica un amănunt? Firește că poți...

P. S. Am deschis chiar acum volumul de Eseuri al lui Borges (Polirom, 2015) la textul intitulat „Floarea lui Coleridge” (pp.165-168). Și, nu, Borges NU spune că eroul povestirii lui Wells aduce un trandafir: „Mai incredibilă decît o floare celestă sau decît floarea dintr-un vis este, desigur, floarea viitoare, contradictoria floare ai cărei atomi ocupă astăzi cu totul alte locuri și nu s-au combinat încă între ei”.

Inexactitatea aparține, prin urmare, lui Mario Vargas Llosa: „Lui Borges îi plăcea să citeze povestirea aceea a lui H. G. Wells (alt autor fascinat, ca şi el, de tema timpului), The Time Machine, în care un om călătoreşte în viitor şi se întoarce cu un trandafir în mînă, ca dovadă a aventurii lui. Acel anormal trandafir nenăscut exalta imaginaţia lui Borges ca paradigmă de obiect fantastic” (Mario Vargas Llosa, Scrisori către un tînăr romancier, traducere din spaniolă de Mihai Cantuniari, București: Humanitas, 2010).

Wells was the first science fiction writer to posit time travel by mechanical means as a literary conceit for presenting both ideas and storylines that otherwise couldn't be explored in fiction; he had done this already in his 1888 story "A Chronic Argonaut," which is sometimes erroneously described as an early version of this novel, although the characters and plot are quite different. But it was through The Time Machine that the idea caught the popular imagination, and became a staple of the genre. (This work illustrates as well as any other the basic difference between Wells' "soft" approach versus that of "hard" SF patron saint Jules Verne; unlike Verne's technologies, this one isn't extrapolated from any existing knowledge and doesn't lay claim to any real probability as a prediction of future human achievement. It's just a pure and simple exercise in "what if?" regardless of scientific fact. Unlike many of Verne's technological wonders, it hasn't come to pass in the present (and Wells didn't expect it to). But it comes to grip with philosophical issues in a much more direct way than most of Verne's work.

As the book description above indicates, those philosophical issues are very much bound up with Darwinism, which the young Wells absorbed as a pupil of "Darwin's bulldog," Thomas Huxley. While the budding author never questioned the truth of what he was taught, he was much more ambivalent about its philosophical implications than the Social Darwinist, moneyed elite of his day (which embraced it with delight). He accepted the idea that "progress" would inevitably result in a Utopian conquest of nature that would abolish toil and scarcity --but he also recognized that, according to Darwinist dogma, without the toil, scarcity, and danger that supposedly functioned as the catalyst for continued upward evolution, the race would necessarily stagnate and devolve. Moreover, the sharp class divisions of Victorian society, with the genetic isolation and mutual antagonism of higher and lower classes, viewed through a Darwinist lens, was a perfect set-up for the evolution of separate and hostile species locked in a struggle for survival; and that one would become the prey of the other was as "natural" a phenomenon as the supposed ratchet towards "progress." And overarching this whole view of the world is the fact of the inevitable future exhaustion of the sun, which (in the absence of anything like Divine intervention) means that the world orbiting it is doomed to eventual extinction, rendering all human existence and achievement existentially meaningless. All of these ideas are worked out to their grim conclusions in the novel, leaving the narrator to observe, near the end, that "it remains for us to live as though it were not so" --a line that certainly serves as its own commentary!

Although I liked it, my rating of this novel isn't quite as high as that of most of my Goodreads friends. It's one of those novels, IMO, that are more important for their historical significance, and for the ideas they present, than for their entertainment value. Character development isn't strong here; we never even learn the Traveler's name, for example, and his interactions with the Morlocks and Eloi (even with Weena) aren't very deep. There is definitely danger and adventure; it's not wholly a novel of colorless ideas. But all the Traveler accomplishes in the end is bare survival, bringing back to the present a cargo of depressing ideas. For the original Victorian readers who shared his presuppositions (and for their counterparts today), those ideas would certainly be gripping and disturbing; and for readers who have never imagined time travel, that very concept would have been a striking source of wonder --like Capt. Nemo's submarine for Verne's original readers. But today, time travel is an old-hat concept for SF fans; it takes more than the bare idea to elicit wonder and excitement. And for readers who don't share his presuppositions, it's hard to suspend disbelief in his depictions of the future, while the ideas he's preaching fall flat. But they remain important ideas to understand, whether you agree with them or not, if you want to fully comprehend what Darwinism means philosophically.