The Time Machine

The Time Machine is H. G. Wells’s short novel about a Victorian inventor who travels far into the future and finds humanity divided into two strange species. Published in 1895, it popularised the idea of travelling through time by machine, and the phrase “time machine” itself.

The story is told within a frame. At a dinner in his house in Richmond, a scientist known only as the Time Traveller explains to sceptical guests that time is a fourth dimension, and shows them a small model machine that vanishes. A week later he staggers in, dusty and limping, and tells them what has happened.

He has travelled to the year 802,701. At first the future seems a gentle paradise. The Eloi, small and graceful people, live in ruined palaces among gardens, eating fruit and playing, with no apparent work or worry. But they are childlike and incurious, and they fear the dark.

When his machine disappears, the Traveller discovers the reason for their fear. Beneath the ground live the Morlocks, pale, ape-like creatures who tend machinery in the dark and come up at night. He realises that humanity has split: the Eloi are descended from a leisured upper class and the Morlocks from labourers driven underground, and the Morlocks now feed on the Eloi.

He befriends Weena, an Eloi woman he saves from drowning, and explores a vast abandoned museum, the Palace of Green Porcelain, in search of weapons. After a terrifying night in a forest, he recovers his machine and escapes further forward.

In a final journey he sees the far future of the Earth: a dying red sun, a cold shore, giant crabs and, at last, near silence and darkness. He returns home to tell his story, offers two strange flowers as proof, and then sets off again. Three years later, the narrator says, he has not come back.

Wells keeps the science light. He explains the machine only in outline and spends his effort on the experience of travel, the strangeness of the future and the Traveller’s own changing theories. The Traveller guesses, revises and admits when he is wrong, so the reader shares his discovery.

The story’s frame matters too. The dinner guests, a doctor, a journalist, a psychologist and others, doubt every word. Their scepticism invites readers to ask whether the tale is true, a hoax or a parable.