The Time Machine

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An English gentleman referred to only by the term Time Traveler is entertaining his weekly guests, a group of men from different fields interested in a machine he has devised which he claims to have the capability to travel through time. A week later, the Time Traveler is late to his weekly party and uses time travel as an excuse, narrating how he has just returned from traveling forward hundreds of thousands of years in time to the year 802,701 where the world is no longer how it is at present. While the planet still exists and remains habitable, mankind has evolved into two distinct species: the pretty but seemingly naïve Eloi who inhabit the world above; and the primitive and brutal Morlocks who fear the light and thus have evolved to live underground. He is also introduced to a young Eloi named Weena, whom he takes along with him in his quest to get back his time machine which the Morlocks have hidden in The Sphinx.

I guess I was naïve enough to expect something similar to the Netflix series Dark, Grandfather Paradox and all as it whisks you through various timelines. Like, doh, this book only has 100 pages. As with most time travel narratives, some opt to travel back, forward, or both. The Time Machine chooses the future, hundreds of thousands of years into it. Simply put, this novella belongs to the Future History subgenre of speculative fiction, a fever dream of sorts that most of us tend to have when we are bored and start reflecting on the future of mankind. It just so happened that H.G. Wells managed to turn his into enduring literature.

While I was bored with the book despite how short a read it is, one cannot deny that it is rife with symbolisms, a critique of society disguised as science fiction. While the author doesn’t make it too obvious, the parallelisms with society are quite clear. What we have here is a hypothesis on the evolution of mankind after it has done away with complications of societal norms. For H.G. Wells, the surface-dwelling Eloi have become naïve, without intellect, and rather primitive despite their prettiness and soft nature. The truth is they have become “cattle” for the Morlocks.

The Morlocks are said to once have served the Eloi, evolving into an existence of servitude until somehow they became the ruling class and are now keeping who were once their masters as some sort of pets and source of food, pretty much like a zoo or meat shop combined. The descriptions can be a bit graphic but at the end of the day, these are just metaphors for human behavior. H.G. Wells was probably just channeling the growing inequities he observed back in Victorian era England. His observations are still valid today. Even though circumstances have changed, we are still heavily divided as a society based on class.

Perhaps the real charm of this book is the grandiose ambition it has of assuming what will happen to our species, to this planet, far ahead into the future. Judging from our history as a species and our time here on Earth which has been relatively short if we take into account how long this planet has existed long before we came around, we are but a short and unwanted advertisement in the hours-long special that is planet Earth. As such, speculations like this seem futile at best. Maybe that’s the point? After all, the Eloi and the Morlocks kind of regressed in the end as far as levels of intellect and self-awareness are concerned, didn't they?

If you are expecting something plot-driven, then this book might disappoint you. What you will get is a Time Traveler’s story heavily based on his speculations about human evolution in the very distant future. We don’t even know if he is just making this up. He blatantly mentions in the book that this could all be a lie or story he has concocted during a daydream, which might very well have been the case. As such, keep your expectations low. Regardless how the storyline bores you, we still have to give credit to this novella for serving as an inspiration for time-travel themed stories that have materialized in its wake.