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Out of date and somewhat out of touch, this is still foundational SF and a must read for fans of the genre.

"In a moment I knew what had happened. I had slept and the bitterness of death came over my soul."

H.G. Wells is such a good writer. Not only does he have an amazing imagination that carries him to impossible places, but he is very skilled at writing. The descriptions in this book are absolutely stunning.

The book deals with a British, upper-class white man who has invented a time machine telling all his cronies about it in the smoking-room. He has traveled to the year 802701, and you have to admire Wells for not making the classic mistake of setting the future too close to the present. I'm certain this story will have impact for millenia to come due to his far-reaching decision.

In the year 802701, there are the kind, playful, gentle child-like people who live on the surface of the planet: the Eloi. The Time Traveller goes on and on and on about how humanity is going to kill itself by becoming "too safe" and "too peaceful"... something I am rather doubtful about happening, BUT ANYWAY, there's also a dark secret lurking in the year 802701, and the Time Traveller gets his first glimpse of it when his Time Machine mysteriously vanishes. Who has taken it and why? Can he ever get it back?

"At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop my breathing."

Of course there are missteps in here, things that will have you shaking your head like comparing "savages" to animals, and the threat of COMMUNISM(!) that actually had me laughing out loud.

"Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently, the single house, and possibly event the household, had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared.

'Communism,' said I to myself."

LOL LOL LOL He thinks the weak, gentle, friendly people of the upper earth are indolent.

"They spent all of their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going."

And he's like, "Those fucking communists!" LOL LOL LOL I couldn't stop laughing. *wipes eyes*

Okay. ANYWAY, the book is good. Short, gripping, with suspense and excitement - paired with Wells exquisite writing.

Here's him describing what travelling through time feels like:

"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback - of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness: the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space, the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue."

I don't know about you, but I could read Wells all day. It's so pretty.

My 1978 copy of this book was literally falling apart in my hands as I was reading this. Oh, well, I'm sure it's free on Kindle.

Tl;dr - Not too long, full of amazing writing, this book is truly transporting. Wells is good at building suspense and creeping you out. He also delivers on some excellent descriptive passages. If he is a little misguided on his ideas about the future, that can be forgiven. It sure is entertaining reading, and understandable why this has been a classic.

"I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then."

BOOKS THIS REMINDED ME OF:
Gulliver's Travels
The Sparrow

Group-Read with my Pantsless Friends. :)

I'm convinced H.G. Wells is the nameless Time Traveler. What a formidable imagination and intellect that he wrote many of his works when most of humanity labored in an agricultural age. At a time when human flight was only theoretical and the industrial age was awakening, he was writing some amazing Science Fiction with sharp social commentary and satire deftly interwoven.

Coincidentally, I recently read The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self (I only connected the dots a few chapters in) which affirms a general Eloi-ization of humanity.

'I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.'
He actually wrote this in the XIIIth chapter! I love this guy.

I cannot believe this book was published in 1895!

***Saywha?!***


I should have read this when I was 10 or something. But I am so so so so glad I just read it. I just cannot believe he wrote all that like more than a century ago. And with such clarity and confidence. That man. I would love to meet him.


His writing is impeccable - the best for a science fiction written literally more than a century ago. It is the most attention demanding, soul-searching and self-accepting intuitive writing style I have ever come across. He vividly described the situation we are at present now!

I would highly doubt if this piece of sci-fi lit was published recently that the author's a fraud and no author of that time would write something so real and happening in terms of science, politics, agriculture and husbandry as well as the human race advancements, arguable developments (that's happening in real now) coming from that era in a written form. I repeat I would have highly doubted it.

I specifically love this one for the arguments and the discussions from different perspectives of different specialists, highlighting the fears and doubts regarding the high-speed advancements and changes caused by such to the environment and lifestyle as a whole even though such have made life easier and better. These arguments and thoughts count still I would say.

This is not just about science and time travel. I loved how closely the author described human emotions, closeness and friendship. And what I appreciate the most is the underlying respect that the narrator had for all kinds of beings and appreciation of everything that was happening around. I find these elements rarely in books related to sci-fi reads.

And yes, it gave me all kinds of creepy feelings knowing the different 'species' but I don't know why this book gave me comfort..so much comfort reading it. I never loved reading about evolution as much as I do with this one as through the eyes of a time traveler. I am so happily overwhelmed right now. This book is so good. Granted it gave me chills and some weird thoughts regarding the dystopian feeling it gave me the entire time. The Elois were creepily cute and the Morlocks. Are we the Morlocks? Weena was a haunting character and will keep on haunting.

I feel sad for the other sci-fi books that I would read from now knowing that I will somehow compare them with this book consciously or subconsciously regarding the writing or the feels or just everything that is remotely sci-fyish.

I so want to know the name of our protagonist here. Mr Wells, that's so shrewd of you.

And yes, this read is nightmarish in its own ways making you actually see how the earth might end as and which kind of hybrid creature would inherit the earth in the end.

And the worst part to imagine for me was the Morlocks feeding on the Eloises.


Yes, I can understand the critical views regarding this book. But, I loved it.

*** 'But to me the future is still black and blank - is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.' ***

How can I possibly not love this?

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and narrated by Carson Beck is an audible book I requested and the review is voluntary. This is one of the few books I have read a few times in my life. I rarely re-read books but this is short and a classic. I have never had it read TO me before and by a professional reader, well, I just had to hear it. It was wonderful! This narration really added some power, emotion, enthusiasm, and tenderness to the reading. I have read this about every 5 years or so but it really is different with an audible book. I just laid back and let my mind go and it was wonderful. It is a short book and I truly enjoyed the time travel vacation my mind took. I think I am very good at adding emotion, and drama to my readings but I do read fast. I think I lose some of this. It was nice to sit back and let it all the emotions pour over me. Wonderful narration! Here is the link to the one I reviewed:
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Time-M...

I remember really liking this as a kid. I still enjoyed it as an adult reread with my non-crunchy but pantsless pals, Evgeny, Jeff, Carmen, Christopher (and some other lovely people who haven't gotten around to reviewing it yet), but not as much.

My review-let for the reread is here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

J. Verne'in bilimsel serüven romanlarının aksine Wells, bilimsel yaklaşımlı toplumsal eleştiriyi, kitaplarının merkezine koymayı amaç edinmiş. Bu yüzden Verne ile kıyaslandığı bir çok inceleme mevcut.

Bilimkurguya yeni başlayan biri olarak türü sevdiğimi söyleyebilirim.
Belirli bir mantık çerçevesinde, aşırı tesadüflerden ve absürtlüklerden uzak her edebi türü okumaya açığım ve bu kitap da başlangıç için bence ideal.

İyi polisiye iyi edebiyattır mottosu aslında türlerden bağımsız hepsi için geçerli.

Zaman Makinesi'nde alt metinlerde yoğun bir kapitalizm eleştirisi olduğunu düşünüyorum.
Sırf bu yüzden dahi gözardı etmeyeceğim :)

Kitapla ilgili tek eleştirim, dipnotların ne yazık ki kitabın arkasında olması. Ne yazık ki hala bu yöntem iş bankasınca bile kullanılıyor.

3.5 stars I didn't have many expectations for this book, and I knew very little about it before going into it aside from the eponymous time machine. But I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by it. Recognizing that it ultimately focuses very little on the machine itself and much more on the time traveler's adventure into the future & the cautionary tale that unfolds due to his findings makes this book a more enjoyable experience. It follows that classic 'unnamed narrator recounting story of other unnamed character' structure, even with a bit of story within a story (a la Frankenstein). Clearly H.G. Wells had an agenda behind this book, as it seems to be a response to Britain's cultural and economic situation in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, it was a fun and entertaining read, and the audiobook--narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi--was excellent.

Time travel is such a familiar fictive concept nowadays that it’s easy to forget how new the idea of a time machine was in 1895, when the then 29-year-old H.G. Wells wrote a short novel titled The Time Machine. And 125 years later, this concise little masterpiece of science fiction has lost none of its power; if anything, it seems more and more prophetic as we all continue forward through the 4th dimension.

The Time Machine is, at its heart, a framed tale. It begins with a conversation among a group of well-educated gentlemen of Victorian England, at the elegant Richmond home of a scientist and inventor who is known simply as “the Time Traveller.” Most of his friends, in a somewhat clumsy characterological development, are likewise referred to in terms of their occupations – “the Editor,” “the Journalist,” “the Medical Man,” “the Provincial Mayor,” “the Psychologist.” At one otherwise ordinary Thursday gathering, the Time Traveller (hereafter T.T.) announces that he has invented a machine that can travel through time; and the following Thursday, a noticeably disheveled and much-the-worse-for-wear T.T. shares with the assembled company, through an extended flashback, the story of his journey through time.

T.T. makes his journeys not back to ancient Egypt or Greece or Rome, or forward to some comprehensible future year like 1984 or 2001, but rather all the way forward to the year 802,701 A.D.! This daring move gives Wells total creative freedom to set forth the far future exactly as he likes; after all, none of us will be around to point fingers and complain that Wells got this or that detail wrong regarding life 800,000 years from now.

And given all that fictive room for free play, Wells makes the most of the opportunity to exercise his extraordinary imagination. Wells may be poking good-natured fun at his own affinity for socialism - or at the average 19th-century Englishman's impressions of socialism - when he records T.T.’s initial response to the world at which he has arrived: “Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared. ‘Communism,’ I said to myself” (p. 29). Well – no, T.T. What’s happening in the year 802,701 A.D., in what was once England, is not communism; it’s something different, and much worse.

At first, T.T. feels as if he has emerged into an earthly paradise. The beings he meets are recognizably human, albeit of smaller size, and they seem to live a life of ease in which they eat delicious fruits, play together all the day long, and never have to work or worry. The Eloi – for T.T. learns that that is their name – are singularly lacking in curiosity, but they are just as singularly benign, and T.T. soon comes to believe that this is the stage to which humanity has evolved in 800,000 years. When T.T. rescues a drowning Eloi girl named Weena, and she thanks him, child-like, with a garland of flowers, he begins to feel a sort of fatherly affection toward her.

But the Eloi are not the only people in town. T.T. finds that his Time Machine has been removed from where he left it! And in a darkened gallery of a long-ruined building, T.T. encounters a creature that is “dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes”, along with “flaxen hair on its head and down its back” (p. 45). This moment represents T.T.’s first encounter with the Morlocks, the other of the two species into which humankind has divided itself over the eons.

The Morlocks live underground, and work great machines in their network of caverns beneath the surface of the earth. At first, T.T. thinks that the Morlocks work for the Eloi; after all, the industrial labourers of his own time do their work hidden from the sun, in settings like factories and coal mines, producing wealth that goes to an aristocracy up on the surface. Yet it turns out that the relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks is actually quite different.

Situational irony of a particularly grim kind abounds; T.T., reconnoitering the Morlocks’ underground lair, notices “a faint halitus of freshly shed blood” and a “red joint” of meat on a table laid for dinner. The reader senses the significance of these clues long before T.T. does – and a potent metaphor emerges for a 19th-century British society that Wells sees devouring itself through its class divisions.

Wells’s pessimism regarding the prospects for human progress comes through clearly in the passages shortly before T.T.’s return to 1895 – when, as T.T. sits in a golden chair atop a high hill, he engages in bitter recollections: “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide” (p. 78). It is against the backdrop of such somber reflections that T.T. makes one last descent into the Morlock abyss in search of his time machine – and then hurtles even further forward into time! You think that traveling to 802,701 A.D. sounds extreme? Try traveling to 30,000,000 A.D., and see where that takes you!

This edition of The Time Machine benefits from the inclusion of Wells’s 1931 preface to a reprint of the novel. While tending to be rather dismissive of The Time Machine as a juvenile effort on the part of a very young writer, Wells nonetheless sounds like a thoroughly contemporary theoretical physicist when he sets forth “the idea that Time is a fourth dimension and that the normal present is a three-dimensional section of a four-dimensional universe” (p. 94).

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, time-travel narratives have become a familiar thing in our, well, time. We are all used to how Terminator movies, Back to the Future movies – even Santa Clause movies – explore the potential paradoxes of time travel. But no one engaged the possibilities of time travel earlier, or better, than H.G. Wells. The Time Machine travels through time by surviving the test of time.

Surely an oversight that I hadn't read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine before now. By all accounts, this is the original time travel story. Still, social class and how technical innovations change humanity are more central to the story than whether the narrator was actually able to travel to 802,701 AD. Ever since, time travel stories have been about exploring the possibilities of the present rather than some far-flung future (or past). This novella was sometimes clunky (but it was written in 1895), but I found it a quick and fun read which continues to be thought provoking. And it has a solid ending!

میتونیم ماشین زمان رو معروف ترین اثر کلاسیک علمی تخیلی معرفی کنیم،کتابی که الهام بخش کتاب ها و فیلم های بسیاری شده

داستان ماجرای دانشمندی که وسیله ای به اسم ماشین زمان میسازه و با اون 800000سال به آینده سفر میکنه . خیلی ایرادها میشه از داستان گرفت ،خیلی ایرادها ولی ترجیح میدم هیچ کدوم رو مطرح نکنم اونم به این دلیل که کتاب 123 سال پیش نوشته شده ، طبیعتا داستان های امروزی در این زمینه خیلی موفق تر و خلاقانه تر عمل میکنن تا کتابی که حتی نور مصنویی (لامپ)رو در آینده های دور تصور میکنه
(احتمال داره 123 سال دیگه همین کتابای امروزی ما هم مسخره به حساب بیان،مگه نه؟)






پ.ن : من کتاب رو با موسیقی متن سریال دکترهو مطالعه کردم که سبب شد تجربه شیرینی از خوندن ماشین زمان داشته باشم
به قدری از این ترکیب خوشم اومد که پیش از خوندن قمارباز دنبال موسیقی بی کلام روسی مناسب می گشتم ، و در آخر چایکوفسکی رو پیدا کردم

¿Te gustaría viajar en el tiempo?

Lo primero que quiero destacar de esta novela es el título. Imaginen que van a una biblioteca, ojean títulos de libros al azar y de repente se cruzan con una obra llamada «La máquina del tiempo». Independientemente, del gusto literario, es muy probable que solo el título te inyecte la curiosidad suficiente para tomar el libro en tus manos, abrirlo y conocer un poco sobre su contenido. En este caso no importa ni el autor, ni el año de publicación, ni la sinopsis. Es un título que atrae a miles de lectores cada año porque su sola mención nos lleva a pensar en los viajes en el tiempo, y nos despierta la imaginación necesaria para pensar en los avances tecnológicos y científicos que podrían crearse en el futuro. Un libro de estas características no necesita sinopsis, publicidad, ni tampoco un público recomendado. Es un libro que se viraliza solo, que sirve de inspiración para nuevos escritores, y que seguramente jamás caerá en el olvido porque su autor fue una gran influencia para el género que conocemos hoy como ciencia ficción. Probablemente, por la fuerza que transmite este título, es que inconscientemente muchas personas eligen este libro como una de sus primeras lecturas en su vida lectora. A mí me ocurrió hace algunos años, lo disfruté en su momento, y considero que fue una motivación importantísima para que empezara a explorar más títulos relacionados de ciencia ficción. Por eso hoy quise releerlo, no solo para recordar el argumento, sino para escribir una reseña digna de este gran trabajo de Herbert George Wells.

Considerando que es una obra escrita hace más de 120 años, La máquina del tiempo no puede juzgarse por la falta de lógica que posee. Obviamente, durante el trascurso del tiempo, la ciencia ha venido progresando de manera asombrosa (y peligrosa), y por tanto las teorías e hipótesis que se manejan hoy en día sobre viajes en el tiempo eran completamente desconocidas en aquel entonces. Además, el autor decide recurrir a la imaginación para dar explicación a los sucesos que acontecen, ya que en realidad, su objetivo no es escribir sobre la tecnología necesaria que se debería tener para viajar en el tiempo, sino sobre los problemas sociales y la decadencia que nuestra especie podría sufrir debido a la marginación de las diferentes clases sociales. Wells da a entender que entre mayores sean nuestras diferencias de raza, sexo, y posición social, más distancia existirán entre los pueblos, llegando incluso a que cada clase social sea una especie diferente de la naturaleza. Wells lleva esta idea al extremo mostrándonos un futuro en el que hay dos especies. Por una parte están unos seres bellos llamados Los Eloi, quienes viven con comodidad y placer, pero sin poseer inteligencia, mientras que por otra parte, existen los Morlocks que son aterradores, viven bajo tierra, son sensibles a la luz, y que tienen más maldad y brutalidad que los llamados cavernícolas. Este libro es una crítica directa a la falta de igualdad de derechos que se ha vivido en toda la historia de la humanidad.

Wells decidió usar como protagonista a un hombre que se sentía muy orgulloso de sus conocimientos y su invento; sin embargo, entre más avanza la novela, más vamos notando que el protagonista sufre un cambio tremendo de mentalidad, no solo porque se confunde de su verdadera realidad, sino porque al ser testigo de los sucesos negativos del futuro empieza a comprender que no siempre lo que deseamos es lo que necesitamos, y que gracias a lo que queremos eliminar como el peligro, o los problemas, es que hemos sido capaces como especie de evolucionar, crear y desarrollar sistemas que nos han ayudado a combatir dichos inconvenientes. El problema, es que si no existieran más problemas, ni más cambios repentinos, entonces nuestra especie entraría en decadencia por la falta de retos nuevos para nuestro cerebro. El protagonista empieza a comprender que un futuro perfecto sería equivalente a la lenta extinción de nuestra especie. Su caos interno, sus hipótesis y sus conclusiones son interesantes de conocerlas.

La ambientación está marcada por un gran aura de tristeza. Es normal creer que el futuro será mucho mejor con respecto a lo que vivimos en nuestra actualidad, y eso se debe en parte a que cuando estudiamos historia observamos los cambios positivos que como sociedad hemos vivido. Sin embargo, aquí Wells nos muestra las dos caras de la moneda: La utopía de la felicidad y la calma, y el triste vacío de la extinción. No sé si pueda catalogarse como pesimismo, pero el estilo con el que describe el mundo —en el último tercio de la novela— tiene un toque fatídico que nos deja la sensación de que no tenemos salvación, ni escapatoria. Según el prólogo que tenía mi edición, se explicaba que justamente ese era el objetivo principal de los primeros cuentos y relatos de ciencia ficción: Mostrar los defectos y desgracias que el avance de la ciencia y la tecnología traerían con el tiempo a la humanidad. Y eso lo hace muy bien Wells porque realmente cuando lees este libro te queda una sensación de pesimismo y desazón por el futuro. ¿La humanidad estará tomando el camino correcto? ¿Será que hay alguna forma de escapar de este inevitable apocalipsis? ¿Hay algo que podamos hacer al respecto? Difícil saberlo, mucho más complejo comprobarlo.

Quizás la prosa no fue la mejor habilidad de este escritor, pero su línea argumental sí está bien diseñada. Fácil de leer, descripciones no excesivas, y una tendencia natural a usar sus elementos narrativos con el fin de criticar sobre lo que no estaba de acuerdo de la sociedad en la que vivió. El final es especulativo, deja abierta la puerta para cualquier hipotética continuación que nunca existió, y por estas y más razones seguirá siendo un clásico de la literatura por mucho tiempo. Este libro se recomienda para quienes quieren comenzar a conocer las ideas y pensamientos del autor, pero otra buena opción sería elegir El hombre invisible o La guerra de los mundos. Libro recomendado.