The Time Machine (1895) is considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written. Like other early works of science fiction, it deals with the author's angst about individual/industrial relations and explores a socialist political vision. Wells's protagonist travels to the year 802,701 and meets the Eloi, a frail set of humans who live simple lives without any need for technology. Later, he meets the Morlocks, bestial cannibals who work under ground to support the Eloi.
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Appendix
14
Afterword
Selected Bibliography
Introduction
BEFORE AIRPLANES, SPACE travel, and atomic energy, before freeways and traffic jams, poison gas and tanks, and just before the dawn of the twentieth century, a nameless inventor in London discovered a way to travel in time, using a mysterious machine assembled in a small private shop.
And an unknown journalist named Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) leaped in a few short years to fame and fortune.
If this is the first time you’ve read The Time Machine, then stop right here. Skip over this introduction, for now, and get right to the story. When you’re done, if you wish, come back and join the discussion. It’s bound to be heated.
To this day, H. G. Wells is controversial, and I doubt he would have had it any other way!
Welcome back. Now how do you feel about time travel? Perplexed, skeptical, excited, a little sad?
By 1895, when The Time Machine was first published in book form, H. G. Wells had lived through years of ill health, married and parted, and tried on a career of teaching, then moved on to journalism and writing reviews. He did not seem very successful at anything, but he was enormously intelligent and ambitious. And he knew he had one story, one idea, one card up his sleeve that could possibly trump all of his disadvantages.
A man, traveling in time, using a machine.
A Time Traveller.
Judging from many drafts and redrafts over at least seven years, Wells knew that he had something big—something that could launch his career very nicely indeed, if he only got it right.
He finally got it right. After its serialization in William Ernest Henley’s The New Review in early 1895, The Time Machine became a sensation. In an age intrigued by all the possibilities of science and mathematics, Wells’s first work of fiction was like a brisk slap in the face. The future will be marvelous, the young Wells told his audience—and also tragic, even horrible. All things biological must end, or give way to new forms, he suggested, following the dour lead of his most influential teacher, Darwin’s “Bulldog,” T. H. Huxley.
For Victorian England, the picture of humanity divided into the diminutive, weak, and sun-dwelling Eloi and those technological dwellers in underground darkness, the Morlocks, must have seemed particularly grotesque—mirroring as it did the tottering class system: quite literally, Upstairs and Downstairs.
In this bleak picture of distant futurity, Wells gives us a final glimmer of human love, innocent and childlike, in the outstretched hand of the tiny Eloi Weena . . . love, however, too weak to withstand the brutal forces of evolution and necessity, and far too swiftly destroyed. As a final fillip, Wells shows us that eventually even the necessity of biological evolution will give way, as the sun swells and reddens, life reverts to the crustacean and then to the (possibly) molluscan or protozoan, and the Earth finally freezes over.
It is an utterly chilling message, mixing as it does human sentiment, contemporary scientific knowledge, unwavering pessimism, and a sense of cosmic wonder and discovery, with the realization of the limited condition of the human race. As a novelistic tour de force, nothing like it had ever been published.
Coming on the heels of decades of speculation about both evolution and geometry, and bringing together recent theories in astronomy and geology, The Time Machine hit the Victorian intellect squarely between the eyes. It was the first modern science fiction novel.
Within nine years, H. G. Wells would write seven more novels—The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901), The Food of the Gods (1904), In the Days of the Comet (1906)—and numerous short stories that would shape and define twentieth-century science fiction. By 1914 and the beginning of World War I, Wells was one of the bestselling authors in the English language.
He became the twentieth-century prototype of the angry young man, brilliant and full of contradictions. Throughout his life, Wells promoted his changeable brand of socialism yet toyed with (early on, at least) a belief in God, called for equality of the sexes yet was a flagrant womanizer, decried class distinctions yet sought the approval of the rich, the powerful, and the famous—and then, just as quickly, denounced them!
In the 1920s, his Outline of History would sell millions of copies. He would become so famous and so influential that authors seeking a reputation—or at least some intellectual balance—would cock their hats and shy stones at his overwhelming success and his pugnacious attitudes.
C. S. Lewis parodied Wells’s brand of evolution and rationalism from a theist perspective in his science fiction novels Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Lewis built an intellectually confused, villainous character named Weston on the frame of a number of scientific acquaintances, possibly including J.B.S. Haldane and Wells. Even as late as 1955, William Golding would reply to Wells’s portrait (in An Outline of History) of low, bestial Neanderthals with his own depiction of them as scions of a kinder nature, brutalized by modern humans, in The Inheritors.
Wells was a marvelous sounding board, and there’s evidence he enjoyed this kind of hurly-burly. What he did not enjoy was a bad review or being ignored.
Above all, he hated being ignored.
All of Wells’s early scientific romances are accessible to a person of average education. They are clearly and elegantly written, not very heavy on the character bits (but convincing in what is shown), realistic despite their fantastic elements, clear-eyed about animal nature—and highly imaginative. They are also thoroughly satirical, though often written with a straight face or at most a wry grimace.
These early novels are far more than just adventurous dives into the deep canyons of fantasy. They are more like mountain climbs to the edge of space. They can be disturbing, and intentionally so. Wells knew early on that his audiences enjoyed a good scare; and he enjoyed, in those prewar years of growing tension, placing human folly in cosmic perspective.
In writing The Time Machine, Wells claimed to draw his inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne, but there is also a touch of Poe in early drafts. Wells was fond of Voltaire, the French philosopher and satirist; he respected but found little useful comparison with Jules Verne, whose own satiric elements are often overlooked. Most often, Wells likened himself to Jonathan Swift, the sardonic Irish author of Gulliver’s Travels.
The Time Machine was compared favorably in one review to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a masterpiece of psychological horror. The Time Machine’s horrors are less moral than neutral, however. Its plan is not so much darkly psychological as biological and physical. Whatever our psychology, our class, our politics, Wells says, the laws of nature will betray us. In the greater scheme of things, our personal lives and wishes seem to mean very little.
This sensation of doom and claustrophobia at the end of life on Earth, and the end of Earth itself, evokes a new kind of fear, a cosmic fear. In later decades, writers as diverse as William Hope Hodgson, H. P. Lovecraft, and Olaf Stapledon would expand upon Wells’s concepts and time scales, with extraordinary results upon philosophy and popular culture. The universe would never look the same to us.
Years later, in 1934, Wells would write that horror is easier to create than hope, or uplifting suggestions for improving the human race. His science fiction novels, however, demand reactions entirely other than paralyzed fear; they provide a clear-eyed perspective of our place in the universe, a realistic sense of human smallness, refreshing to this day in our world of simian self-regard.
We still need the Wellsian anodyne of these brisk, abrupt, and heated early novels, and in particular, we still need The Time Machine.
How did a draper’s assistant, son of a man variously described as a cricketer, a gardener, and a shopkeeper, with a sporadic education and in frequent ill health, come to put together something so rich, diverse, and utterly new?
H. G. Wells began by studying hard. He took advantage of an experiment in free schooling at the Normal School of Science (after 1890 renamed the Royal College of Science) to listen to some of the great voices and minds of his day. He read everything he could get his hands on: biology, geology, astronomy, and of course geometry. Victorians were masters at playing with geometric concepts, witness Lewis Car-roll’s Alice stories and Edwin A. Abbott’s masterwork, Flatland (1884). (Abbott was not a mathematician, but a schoolmaster, as was Wells for a time.)
A fellow student, E. A. Hamilton-Gordon, presented a paper on the fourth dimension at a meeting of the Debating Society that bore a distinct (though perhaps coincidental) resemblance to an essay by C. H. Hinton called “What Is the Fourth Dimension?”, published in 1884-1885 in his two-volume collection, Scientific Romances . Hamilton-Gordon’s talk and possibly Hinton’s essay are likely the prime influences on Wells’s discussion of the fourth dimension and time travel.
Earlier still, topologist August Ferdinand Möbius (1790-1868) had described, among other wonders, the one-sided piece of paper that bears his name. Giving a longish strip of paper a half twist and then fastening the ends together produces a marvelous “vanishing” of one side. (Try it—ignore the glued or taped part, and run your finger around the entire surface . . . an endless loop! If one can lose geometric features, isn’t it possible to gain a few, as well? An extra dimension, perhaps?)
Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, T. H. Huxley, and other controversial biological thinkers had shown the scientific world that humans had evolved over deep time, and this implied that they could still evolve—in Huxley’s opinion, not necessarily for the better, but almost certainly in adaptation to a dying world. Wells autographed a copy of the British edition of The Time Machine for Huxley in May 1895:
Dear Sir,
I am sending you a little book that I fancy may be of interest to you. The central idea—that of degeneration following security—was the outcome of a certain amount of biological study. I daresay your position subjects you to a good many such displays of the range of authors but I have this much excuse—I was one of your pupils at the Royal College of Science and finally: the book is a very little one.
Huxley died in June of that year. He probably never had time to read his student’s novel.
The year 802,701, the last date specified in The Time Machine, was far more remote to a scientist in Wells’s era than it might seem now. (Though very little science fiction even today ventures so far into the future.) The best scientific speculation of the time placed the age of the solar system at no more than fifteen to twenty-four million years, based on the probability that the sun was a combusting ball of gas.
This relatively brief span caused Darwinians and many geologists concern. The Darwinians needed great gulfs of time—certainly more than just tens of millions of years—to explain the diversity of life on Earth through slow and gradual evolution. The geologists saw evidence of processes occurring over hundreds of millions of years, possibly even billions of years.
Fusion of hydrogen into helium and heavier elements was of course unknown at the time. It wasn’t until the 1920s and the researches of deep-sky astronomers like Edwin Hubble that the true size and age of the universe began to be understood, and the Darwinians and geologists could breathe easier. However, Wells’s estimate of the time and nature of the death of the Earth was in agreement with the science of the time, and his description of the sun blossoming into a red giant is still accurate enough—though the Earth is likely to be swallowed by this future monstrosity and crisped, not frozen.
Wells acquired skepticism early in his life. As he wrote The Time Machine, he was unsure of what lay ahead for himself, much less the human race. Both personally and historically, the last decade of the nineteenth century was a time of danger and change. Engaged in an affair with future wife Amy Catherine Robbins (whom Wells would nickname “Jane”), recently separated from his first wife, cousin Isabel, and barely earning any kind of living, Wells likely began each day by being at least a little frightened.
Like T. H. Huxley, whose own upbringing was far from upper-crust, Wells distrusted the soothing religious and political babble of the day. Not for him the easy pathway to a gentleman’s success and leisure. He could not trust the class system that would have relegated him, by birth alone, to obscurity; the son of a tradesman, Wells clearly saw that unearned privilege and inbred claims of intellectual supremacy draped England and Europe in a shroud of ill omen.
Consequently, his first work of fiction is dark, almost hopeless—but for the tiny hand of love offered by a future childlike member of the “upper” classes, Weena.
Later, Wells would regret this self-styled hat flipping and reliance on visceral emotions, aiming instead for a program of intellectual and moral reform, of disciplined hope and warnings of the bleaker prospects of the twentieth century. Still, to his irritation, his early scientific romances remained his most popular works. He had done more than strike a chord; he had composed a new kind of symphony.
To the masses of readers around the world, especially in information-hungry America and England, Wells became the prophet of science and a hopeful if stern critic of political and technological progress. Along the way, however, his reputation and his own sense of self-worth were almost derailed by the very violence he predicted with such prescience.
As Wells had feared, the ruling upper classes did goof, and horribly, in both politics and military strategy. World War I killed ten million people and ravaged Europe. (Spanish influenza, possibly spread by troop mobilizations and international trauma and stress, killed tens of millions more.)...
Chapter 1
The time traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way – marking the points with a lean forefinger – as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.
‘You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.’
‘Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?’ said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
‘I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.’
‘That is all right,’ said the Psychologist.
‘Nor, having only length, breadth and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.’
‘There I object,’ said Filby. ‘Of course a solid body may exist. All real things—’
‘So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?’
‘Don’t follow you,’ said Filby.
‘Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?’
Filby became pensive. ‘Clearly,’ the Time Traveller proceeded, ‘any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness and – Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.’
‘That,’ said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; ‘that . . . very clear indeed.’
‘Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,’ continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. ‘Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this Fourth Dimension?’
‘I have not,’ said the Provincial Mayor.
‘It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly –why not another direction at right angles to the other three? – and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four – if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?’
‘I think so,’ murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words. ‘Yes, I think I see it now,’ he said after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.
‘Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty three and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.
‘Scientific people,’ proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, ‘know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognized? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension.’
‘But,’ said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, ‘if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move about in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?’
The Time Traveller smiled. ‘Are you so sure we can move freely in Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.’
‘Not exactly,’ said the Medical Man. ‘There are balloons.’
‘But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.’
‘Still they could move a little up and down,’ said the Medical Man.
‘Easier, far easier down than up.’
‘And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.’
‘My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.’
‘But the great difficulty is this,’ interrupted the Psychologist. ‘You can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.’
‘That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?’
‘Oh, this,’ began Filby, ‘is all—’
‘Why not?’ said the Time Traveller.
‘It’s against reason,’ said Filby.
‘What reason?’ said the Time Traveller.
‘You can show black is white by argument,’ said Filby, ‘but you will never convince me.’
‘Possibly not,’ said the Time Traveller. ‘But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine—’
‘To travel through Time!’ exclaimed the Very Young Man.
‘That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the driver determines.’
Filby contented himself with laughter.
‘But I have experimental verification,’ said the Time Traveller.
‘It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,’ the Psychologist suggested. ‘One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the Battle of Hastings, for instance!’
‘Don’t you think you would attract attention?’ said the Medical Man. ‘Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.’
‘One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,’ the Very Young Man thought.
‘In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.’
‘Then there is the future,’ said the Very Young Man. ‘Just think! One might invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!’
‘To discover a society,’ said I, ‘erected on a strictly communistic basis.’
‘Of all the wild extravagant theories!’ began the Psychologist.
‘Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until—’
‘Experimental verification!’ cried I. ‘You are going to verify that?’
‘The experiment!’ cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.
‘Let’s see your experiment anyhow,’ said the Psychologist, ‘though it’s all humbug, you know.’
The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then, still smiling faintly, and with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the room, and we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his laboratory.
The Psychologist looked at us. ‘I wonder what he’s got?’
‘Some sleight-of-hand trick or other,’ said the Medical Man, and Filby tried to tell us about a conjurer he had seen at Burslem; but before he had finished his preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby’s anecdote collapsed.
The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I must be explicit, for this that follows – unless his explanation is to be accepted – is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the small octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it in front of the fire, with two legs on the hearth rug. On this table he placed the mechanism. Then he drew up a chair, and sat down. The only other object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the bright light of which fell full upon the model. There were also perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks upon the mantel and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly illuminated. I sat in a low armchair nearest the fire, and I drew this forward so as to be almost between the Time Traveller and the fireplace. Filby sat behind him, looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man and the Provincial Mayor watched him in profile from the right, the Psychologist from the left. The Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all on the alert. It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and however adroitly done, could have been played upon us under these conditions.
The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism.
‘Well?’ said the Psychologist.
‘This little affair,’ said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, ‘is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.’ He pointed to the part with his finger. ‘Also, here is one little white lever, and here is another.’
The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. ‘It’s beautifully made,’ he said.
‘It took two years to make,’ retorted the Time Traveller. Then, when we had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said: ‘Now I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion. This saddle represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently I am going to press the lever, and off the machine will go. It will vanish, pass into future Time and disappear. Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I don’t want to waste this model, and then be told I’m a quack.’
There was a minute’s pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about to speak to me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his finger towards the lever. ‘No,’ he said suddenly. ‘Lend me your hand.’ And turning to the Psychologist, he took that individual’s hand in his own and told him to put out his forefinger. So that it was the Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone – vanished! Save for the lamp the table was bare. Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.
The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly looked under the table. At that the Time Traveller laughed cheerfully. ‘Well?’ he said, with a reminiscence of the Psychologist. Then, getting up, he went to the tobacco jar on the mantel, and with his back to us began to fill his pipe.
We stared at each other. ‘Look here,’ said the Medical Man, ‘are you in earnest about this? Do you seriously believe that that machine has travelled into time?’
‘Certainly,’ said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a spill at the fire. Then he turned, lighting his pipe, to look at the Psychologist’s face. (The Psychologist, to show that he was not unhinged, helped himself to a cigar and tried to light it uncut.) ‘What is more, I have a big machine nearly finished in there’ – he indicated the laboratory – ‘and when that is put together I mean to have a journey on my own account.’
‘You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future?’ said Filby.
‘Into the future or the past – I don’t, for certain, know which.’
After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. ‘It must have gone into the past if it has gone anywhere,’ he said.
‘Why?’ said the Time Traveller.
‘Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it travelled into the future it would still be here all ...
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