The Time Machine in Gary Starta sci fi group

Jul 11, 2021 Shane rated it really liked it

This novella has stood the test of time, and despite the many knock-offs, derivatives, and extensions of the time-travel novel genre that have come out since, it held my attention for the intellectual and social issues it surfaced.

Wells’ anonymous Time Traveller—in fact, many in his interested dinner circle don’t have names and are called The Medical Man, the Very Young Man, the Psychologist, the Provincial Mayor, Blank the Editor, and the Silent Man—is recounting his recent adventure on his bic This novella has stood the test of time, and despite the many knock-offs, derivatives, and extensions of the time-travel novel genre that have come out since, it held my attention for the intellectual and social issues it surfaced.

Wells’ anonymous Time Traveller—in fact, many in his interested dinner circle don’t have names and are called The Medical Man, the Very Young Man, the Psychologist, the Provincial Mayor, Blank the Editor, and the Silent Man—is recounting his recent adventure on his bicycle-like machine that can take him forward and back in time. The narrator relaying the Time Traveller’s story is also nameless.

The Time Traveller arrives in the year 8002701 AD where mankind is divided into two species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The former are pretty little people who spend their time playing gently, bathing in the river, making love in a half-playful fashion, eating only fruit, and sleeping in groups. “The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay.” And yet that most vital stamp that creates our humanness, “the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young”—doesn’t exist here.

The Morlocks, on the other hand, are the meat-eating workers who live underground, the ones who create industry and commerce, and are given to the basest impulses of humanity. They were once subservient to the Eloi, but as the latter atrophied by living their perfect life, the Morlocks have gained ascendence, even eating Eloi for sustenance and terrorising the little people. In a museum dedicated to artifacts from our time, the Time Traveller sees evidence of the futility of ambition and immortality.

Our Time Traveller, the quintessential fearless explorer, is able to make quick inferences of what has led to this pass; he escape from the clutches of both the Eloi and the Morlocks, retrieves and refires up his time machine, and returns to the present to tell his story to his unbelieving audience.

But those who experience a mind-altering event fall prey to the drug of this new stimulus. Despite the evidence of futility he witnessed in that museum in 8002701 AD, the Time Traveller wants to push the boundaries of his invention and travel even beyond in time to where this world will face extinction. His discovery is disturbing but inevitable. This addiction to time travel is also his undoing. And the vanishing Time Traveller is conclusive evidence to his unbelieving dinner guests, that perhaps they should take him seriously.

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Nov 23, 2013 Josh rated it really liked it

Lovely framing device surrounding a beautifully bleak examination of man's place in the universe. Beautiful. Bleak. Sci-fi. Yesss. I want to live on that shore at the end of time... ...more

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