A Dystopian Glimpse at Humanity’s Future

Book Review: The Time Machine
Author: H.G. Wells
Published in 1895, The Time Machine , H.G. Wells’ first novel, is a scientific romance that inverts the nineteenth-century belief in evolution as progress. The novel is considered one of the earliest works of science fiction and the progenitor of the time travel subgenre. The story follows a Victorian scientist who claims that he has invented a device that enables him to travel through time. He claims he has visited the future, arriving in the year 802,701 in what had once been London. There, he finds the future race, or, more accurately, races, because the human species has “evolved” into two distinct forms. Above ground live the Eloi: gentle, fairy-like, childish creatures, whose existence appears to be free of struggle. However, another race of beings also exists: the Morlocks, underground dwellers who, once subservient , now prey on the feeble , defenceless Eloi. The novel is a class fable , as well as a scientific parable , in which the two societies of Wells’ own period (the upper classes and the “lower orders”) are recast as equally, though differently, degenerate beings. Wells’ dystopic vision in The Time Machine is a deliberate challenge to the utopian fictions common in the late nineteenth century, in particular William Morris’ News from Nowhere . Where Morris depicts a pastoral, egalitarian utopia, Wells represents a world in which the human struggle is doomed to failure. (Reading text adapted from britannica)