The time machine

This book might be part of the Dover thrift editions series.

THE TIME MACHINE is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. Wells is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle.

The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, in Victorian England, and identified by a narrator simply as the …

The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, in Victorian England, and identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller. The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension, and his demonstration of a tabletop model machine for travelling through it. He reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time, and returns at dinner the following week to recount a remarkable tale, becoming the new narrator. . .

125 editions

76 pages

English language

Published Oct. 8, 1995 by Dover Publications.

ISBN:: 978-0-486-28472-9
Copied ISBN!
Goodreads:: 28820272

View on OpenLibrary

View on Inventaire

Subjects

Time travel -- Fiction

Reviews

Balbec reviewed La machine à explorer le temps by H. G. Wells

La machine à explorer le temps

3.5 stars

Ce livre de Herbert George Wells est tellement ancré dans notre imaginaire collectif que je me demandais si je l'avais déjà lu. Le voyage dans le temps n'est guère différent de l'exploration géographique. Nous pourrions tout aussi bien partir à la découverte des Sélénites, sur la lune, comme nous le proposait (Savinien de) Cyrano de Bergerac, avec ainsi la possibilité de décaler un peu le regard sur notre propre société. Fin XIXe, le monde terrestre ayant été largement exploré, il est tentant pour l'écrivain d'élargir son horizon en permettant le voyage temporel. J'ai pour ma part préféré le début du roman, qui fait beaucoup penser à mes lectures de Jules Verne lorsque j'étais enfant. J'ai moins accroché avec la suite des aventures de l'explorateur.

Kelson Reads reviewed The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

Thought-provoking speculation about the future of humanity

4.5 stars

Content warning Not sure why I'm putting a spoiler alert on a book that's more than a century old, but hey, you might not have seen either of the movies, and even if you did, they might not have made it clear what was going on with the Morlocks and Eloi.

I remember watching the 1960 movie of The Time Machine many times on TV when I was growing up. But somehow I never quite got around to reading the book until now.

It's a bit dry by modern standards, but the framing sequence does draw you in, and of course once he starts telling the story of his trip 800,000 years into the future, there's a wealth of speculation. The narrator self-conciously admits that he's drawing inferences on what's going on beyond what he sees, that the short week he had in that time isn't enough for him to be sure he really understands.

There's a bit of adventure, a bit of travelogue, a side trip to the last days of Earth before the expanding red giant sun swallows it up. But time travel isn't really the point. It's just the mechanism to comment on 19th century western society.

Eat the Rich:

The division between labor and capital, or working class and aristocracy, has become full-on speciation. Humanity has split into the beautiful, childlike, idle Eloi and the monstrous, brutal Morlocks who maintain the vast underground machines that provide the Eloi everything they need.

Ironically, the socialist Wells sets up his protagonist and his audience to have more in common with the Eloi than the Morlocks. The time traveler is upper class, has servants, and has the money and time to spend years tinkering with inventions. His friends gather for formal dinner parties, though they're mostly professionals rather than idlers. He pities the Eloi for their complete uselessness, identifies with them as they look more like today's humans, and of course has nothing to fear from them. The Morlocks look more monstrous to him, and you get the impression that even if they weren't attacking the Eloi at night and stealing the time machine, he'd still be horrified rather than pity their fate.

(Interesting side note: the description of the Morlocks in the book is awfully similar to the way Weta Digital designed Gollum. And yet Bilbo and Frodo both found it in their hearts to pity him.)

It's a cautionary tale of what happens when you treat whole classes as subhuman, and still insist that they do all the work for you.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/time-machine/