The Time Machine

The Time Machine is a science-fiction novella by H. G. Wells, first published in 1895. It is considered one of the earliest works of science fiction and the first of the subgenre of "time travelling". In fact, the very term "time machine" owes its introduction to this work.

The premise of the work is an unnamed "Time Traveller" who builds a device that he uses to travel just over 800,000 years into the future. In relating his story, Wells draws upon social conditions and trends of his own time and uses the story as a vehicle to examine these aspects of his own society.

Plot summary

The Time Traveller explains to some guests the principles of time travel and demonstrates a small prototype Time Machine. He shows them a larger such device not yet completed, but nearly so.

A week later, several guests assemble once again. The Time Traveller shows up late for the scheduled dinner party, disheveled and somewhat the worse for wear. He explains that he has been time travelling and agrees to relate the full story of his adventures.

The Time Traveller explains that, after putting the finishing touches on his Time Machine, he tried it in a brief experiment, and then set it in motion more determinately. When he stopped the machine, he found himself in a small clearing in a garden, with a large marble Sphinx-like statue nearby and some larger buildings a bit off in the distance. He is approached by a number of small, frail-looking human-like creatures.

These strange, almost childlike people were, as he shall discover later, the Eloi, and the Time Traveller has flung himself slightly over 800,000 years into the future. He finds the Eloi living in a seemingly idyllic society, one without war, famine, disease, or other social ills familiar from his own time, one where every need was freely supplied without the necessity of hard, sweat-of-the-brow labor. In sum, it appeared to be a veritable paradise, the utopia dreamed of by men of his age.

The Traveller theorizes that at some point in time between his own age and this Golden Age, mankind had finally achieved the aim of all his strivings and, mastering nature and the elements, had created the Utopia. On this theory, the observed condition of the Eloi reflected a subsequent evolutionary process of adaptation to this new environment where the presumed natural human traits of strength, inquisitiveness, inventiveness, acquisitiveness, fierceness, loyalty, aggression, etc, were de-selected by evolution as being unneeded or even counter productive under these new conditions.

He now returns to the scene of his entry into this future world and discovers, to his consternation, that the Time Machine is nowhere to be seen. By degrees, he comes to the conclusion that the device has been moved (he originally suspects the Eloi), somehow, inside the base upon which the Sphinx-like statue rests. Following this, however, he gradually comes to the conclusion that the Eloi are not the only race of men in this society.

Taking everything he now knows into consideration, he concludes that mankind had somehow differentiated into two distinct species, one (the Eloi) adapted to a daylight, above-ground existence of leisure and the other (the Morlocks) adapted to a nighttime, subterranian world of work. He speculates that this came about as the natural evolutionary outcome of the industrial conditions of his own day. The rigid class and social structure of his time had, it seemed to him, resulted in the separate evolution of the leisured aristocracy (the Eloi) and the working class (the Morlocks). In this scheme, the Eloi appeared as the "master race" with such work as was necessary to their comfort being performed underground by the Morlocks.

He also concludes that the Time Machine has been taken by the Morlocks and that he must descend into the underground in order to recover it.