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Here is the archetypal time travel story, the progenitor of so
many later science fiction works. But unlike other writers, who
get caught up in metaphysical issues—what
happens if I go back in time and murder my
great-grandfather?—Wells just plunges into
the adventure. His traveler jumps off to the
year 802,701, fights for love and honor, and
manages to come back (just barely) to tell
the tale to his buddies.
But this is not sheer escapism. Wells was as
much a social thinker as a novelist, even if
his philosophy has not held up as well as his
tales. His future is a fanciful extrapolation
of the class frictions of his era. In this dis-
tant future date, the working class have morphed into the
morlocks, who after millennium of oppression now live and
work underground in dark, satanic shafts. The ruling class has
become a race of under-sized simpletons, known as Eloi. Small
(around four feet tall) and frail, they are no longer able to
dominate the Morlocks, who now pick them off for sport and
supper.
The Time Machine is thus part of that great British tradition of
depicting a fictional future (or alternate history present) that
pushes to a crisis point whatever current political or social
issue captivates the author. Sci-fi fans have enjoyed this
indirect method of social commentary from George Orwell and
Aldous Huxley to the Culture stories of Iain Banks and Kazuo
Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. But H.G. Wells is the father figure
behind all of them, the prophet who showed that we can
sometimes best understand the present by projecting its
concerns into an alternative world constructed by a leap of the
imagination.
But The Time Machine is more of a pure adventure story than
Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World. Despite its
relatively short length (less than 40,000 words), the narrative
is full of fights with Morlocks—down inside their dark shafts, or
inside a museum, or in a forest late at night—and various other
conflicts and mysteries. Wells even tosses in a romantic angle,
with his time traveler finding true love and companionship with
the lovely Eloi named Weena.
Pretty good for a story that takes place mostly during the
course of a few hours. Well, actually it takes place over the
course of eight days in the future. But those eights days
comprise just a few hours between the time traveler leaving
and then returning. Heck, forget it all. We will leave it other
commentators to worry about the chronology, and all that stuff
about my grandfather. The Time Machine won’t solve
metaphysical problems, but it remains a jolly good read more
than a century after Wells offered it to the reading public.
conceptual
fiction
fiction
[kuhn-SEP-choo-uhl FIK-shuhn]
Noun: Storytelling raised to a higher degree through
artful reconfiguration of the reader's conception of reality.
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Noun: Storytelling raised to a higher degree through
artful reconfiguration of the reader's conception of reality.
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells
Reviewed by Ted Gioia