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 distant 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.