It's funny how often the very first of a new genre - the pioneers of literature, those that influence all that come after them - turn out to contain so much good material that, for all their influence, goes completely forgotten by later generations. The original time travel story does not concern itself with hyper-advanced space-faring future societies, nor time paradoxes or exploits (though they're briefly mentioned, demonstrating that Wells already knew where this was going even if he didn't look into it himself), and instead shoots straight past them and into the regressed final stages of humanity itself. It's not here to show us delightful action or fantastic and improbable future vistas, nor mess with our brains by means of time loops and such weirdness - instead it gives us a vision of where we would end up if we kept on going the way we are going right now. I suppose the closest modern-day equivalent would be Idiocracy.

The takeaway here is, nothing is perfect. Nothing can be perfect. And when we think we've achieved it, we've already begun to regress. The fall of an entire civilization typically follows.

Our own society is nowhere near to such perfection, but I do think we're much too concerned with what we have right now, rather than breaking new ground and looking to accomplish new great things, chase new horizons, solve the mysteries of the universe, and spreading out. Reading this book only reinforces one of my strongest beliefs: that we really should go out into space. Being stuck in this one cramped little ball is going to be our doom.

DNF. I tried to like it. I am not a SciFi fan, but loved 1984 when my book club chose it earlier this year. This past month they chose this one and I was hopeful it would be equally as good. Unfortunately I couldn't finish it.

Group read with the Non-Crunchy Pantsless Classics people!

Technically this is the June buddy read... whoops.

Not sure why I've stayed away from HG Wells as long as I have; I've heard of his stories many times and know they belong to the classic canon -- The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr Moreau -- but this is the first I've read and I have to say I enjoyed it.

It particularly had a hand in urging me toward Jekyll & Hyde for our October read (and I'll likely read it either way come Halloween time) thanks to the way the story, or at least part of it, is told by a character who is seeing things from outside the main character's point of view. That is, our narrator is retelling the story to the reader as it is being told to him by the time-traveler. John Utterson does this in a similar fashion in the Jekyll & Hyde story, if memory serves me.

Anyway, the story itself was beautifully told and very suspenseful. Scott Brick did an excellent job narrating, as always, and I'm looking forward to stumbling across Wells again in the future.

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.

Given I'm not a science fiction reader normally, I was quite surprised how much I enjoyed this. I was also surprised to realize there are a lot of similarities between this book and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. That's probably why I enjoyed this one so much, actually! (I loved The Sparrow.)

Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book and its Wishbone adaptation over on my Booktube channel, abookolive!

H.G Wells is the Shakespeare of science fiction. After watching a 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, he designed a time machine. One day while working, he travels into the year 802,701. In the dark night, the first thing he saw is the white sphinx which is the key to his past and present. Soon he realized that humankind divided into two types.

One is Eloi, who lives above the earth and fears the murk. Others are Morlocks, they stroll in dark and exist subterrene. Time Traveller meets an Eloi named Weena. She helped him with this new world. Morlocks stole the time machine and the protagonist ignited a war against them.

H.G. Wells described the characters by their profession. The protagonist portrays as a capable and headstrong man. Weena is considered as a symbol of hope and humanity. The other roles don't have space to grow. The words are complicated to discern. In the beginning, I googled a lot of terms. I also felt that the story is a bit dull. Although the book has inspired many more works of fiction, and I like the way the author narrates the whole story. If you're into classics, this is a must-read.

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Finally got around to read this classic sci-fiction. In ways more than one this book was a pioneer in introducing this genre and more specifically the time and space travel themes. There is a very strong underlying theme of exploitation, decadence due to excess and the limit to progress. Interesting read.

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.

A Victorian-era scientist calls together a group of men and tells them of his recent adventure, a trip through time...

I had intended to participate in a reading of this with the Distinguished Society of Pantless Readers but once I had a taste, I wolfed the whole tale down in one sitting.

The Time Machine is probably the first time travel story and definitely a spiritual ancestor of every time travel story since. The nameless time traveler whips up a time machine and travels through time. What could be simpler?

The Traveler goes to the year 802,000 and encounters the descendants of man, the Eloi and the Morlocks. Wells uses the Eloi and the Morlocks to illustrate the class differences in his own time but the Traveler's speculation on the haves and have-nots sounded very familiar, a nice bit of timeless social satire. After some misadventures, he returns home and no one believes him. To show those assholes, he goes on another jaunt and was never head from again. At least at the time of the Time Machine's publication.

The Time Machine broke a lot of new ground. It was probably the first time travel story and it could be argued that it was both the first dystopian sf story and the first Dying Earth tale. It's also not much of a stretch to call it an ancestor of the planetary romance genre as well. There's not a lot separating The Traveler from John Carter of Mars, if you think about it.

While there's a lot of fun timey-wimey stuff going on, Wells' prose isn't easy to digest. Part of it is the writing style of the time and another part is that science fiction was still in diapers at the time this was written.

Wells' depiction of future Earth was a very memorable one, one that influenced countless authors that came after. Adjusting for the time period, The Time Machine is a fun yet somewhat difficult read. Four out of five Sonic Screwdrivers.

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.

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

The Time Machine is one of my favorite books. It’s a great story, and very well-written. It has the first use of time travel as plot device, used to tell a thought-provoking critique of modern society. It is one of the foundational stories of science fiction, but completely readable today. A must-read if you never have.

P.S. I don’t normally comment on when whether I read a book or listened to the unabridged audiobook. But this time I listened to an audiobook recorded by Sir Derek Jacobi. Highly recommended.

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.