Customer Reviews

The Time Machine (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(222)
4 star:		(149)
3 star:		(70)
2 star:		(28)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

It goes without saying that this book is a science fiction classic in every sense of the word and that H.G. Wells was a founding father of the genre. This book proves that science fiction does not necessarily need to be heavily technical but does need to deal with grand themes such as the nature of society; man's hopes, dreams, and fears; and the very humanity of man. Wells does not go to great lengths in describing the time machine nor how it works. He lays the foundation of the story in science and then proceeds with his somewhat moralistic and certainly socially conscious story. This makes his writing much more enjoyable than that of a Jules Verne, who liked to fill up pages with scientific and highly technical nomenclature. One of the more striking aspects of the novel is Wells' treatment of the actual experience of time travel--moving in time is not like opening and walking through a door. There are physical and emotional aspects of the time travel process--in fact, some of the most descriptive passages in the book are those describing what the Time Traveler experiences and sees during his time shifts.

Basically, Wells is posing the question of What will man be like in the distant future? His answer is quite unlike any kind of scenario that modern readers, schooled on Star Wars, Star Trek, and the like, would come up with. He gives birth to a simple and tragic society made up of the Eloi and the Morlocks. In contrasting these two groups, he offers a critique of sorts of men in his own time. Clearly, he is worried about the gap between the rich and the poor widening in his own world and is warning his readers of the dangers posed by such a growing rift. It is most interesting to see how the Time Traveler's views of the future change over the course of his stay there. At first, he basically thinks that the Morlocks, stuck underground, have been forced to do all the work of man while the Eloi on the surface play and dance around in perpetual leisure. Later, he realizes that the truth is more complicated than that. The whole book seems to be a warning against scientific omniscience and communal living. The future human society that the Time Traveler finds is supposedly ideal--free of disease, wars, discrimination, intensive labor, poverty, etc. However, the great works of man have been lost--architectural, scientific, philosophical, literary, etc.--and human beings have basically become children, each one dressing, looking, and acting the same. The time traveler opines that the loss of conflict and change that came in the wake of society's elimination of health, political, and social issues served to stagnate mankind. Without conflict, there is no achievement, and mankind atrophies both mentally and physically.

This basic message of the novel is more than applicable today. While it is paramount that we continue to research and discover new scientific facts about ourselves and the world, we must not come to view science as a religion that can ultimately recreate the earth as an immense garden of Eden. Knowledge itself is far less important than the healthy pursuit of that knowledge. Man's greatness lies in his ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Speaking only for myself, I think this novel points out the dangerousness of Communism and points to the importance of individualism--if you engineer a society in which every person is "the same" and "equal," then you have doomed that society.

When I tried reading this book as a child many, many years ago, some of the "big" words and allusions made it hard going, and I never completed it then. Finally, about fifteen years ago I did read it through, but still was missing something. Then, a few weeks ago, I got this edition, after having enjoyed the Penguin edition of "The War of the Worlds" with its annotations and map. Well, the annotations in this edition (about four pages worth as endnotes) of "The Time Machine" cleared away whatever fuzz remained, and I was completely overcome by the greatness of the book, great from whatever way I looked at it: plot, speculation, characters, "sense of wonder", even throw away humor were all topnotch. I couldn't believe what I'd been missing. A few days later, I read another editon of the book that didn't have notes, and had no trouble following that version. I plan to reread the book again shortly. So if you've had difficulty reading "The Time Machine" for some of the reasons mentioned above, get this version pronto and find out what a true classic is.

This is the little number that started it all. For the English-speaking world (some translations of Verne possibly aside), science fiction begins with the four brief, brilliant novels published by H G Wells in the 1890s. The War of the Worlds is a still-unsurpassed alien invasion story; The Invisible Man one of the first world-dominating mad scientist tales; and The Island of Dr Moreau a splendidly misanthropic story of artificial evolution and genetic modification. But The Time Machine came first, launching Wells' career in literature; and, after just over a century, there still isn't anything nearly like it. A Victorian inventor travels to the year 802701, where the class divisions of Wells' day have evolved two distinct human races: the helpless, childlike and luxurious Eloi and the monstrous, mechanically adept and subterranean Morlocks. Predictably, the film version turned them into the usual Good Guys and Bad Guys, though it's still worth seeing, particularly for its conception of the Time Machine itself - a splendid piece of Victorian gadgetry. The book, despite its sociological-satirical premise, is rather more complex in its treatment of the opposed races, and the Time Traveller's voyage ends, not with them, but still further in the future, with images of a dead sun and a dark earth populated only by scuttling, indefinite shadows. As in the other three novels, too, the premise of the story is carefully worked out and clearly explained - a discipline largely beyond science fiction today, in which time travel, invading aliens or whatever are simply taken for granted as convenient genre props and automatic thought-nullifiers. After more than a century, The Time Machine is still waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

An unnamed time traveler sees the future of man (802,701 A.D.) and then the inevitable future of the world. He tells his tale in detail.

I grew up on the Rod Taylor /George Pal movie. When I started the book I expected it to be slightly different with a tad more complexity as with most book/movie relationships. I was surprised to find the reason for the breakup of species (Morlock and Eloi) was class Vs atomic (in later movie versions it was political). I could live with that but to find that some little pink thing replaced Yvette Mimieux was too munch.

After al the surprises we can look at the story as unique in its time, first published in 1895, yet the message is timeless. The writing and timing could not have been better. And the ending was certainly appropriate for the world that he describes. Possibly if the story were written today the species division would be based on eugenics.

The Time Machine Starring: Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human L

As I stated in my other reviews, I normally don't enjoy science fiction novels; this book I had to read for school. As I read what I expected to be a boring and unentertaining novel, my opinion changed, and I became more open to enjoying the story. I found that it was an enchanting novel that no one should pass up. H. G. Wells made the story come alive and he made the setting, set in the future, somewhere you feel could possibly exist as his descriptions are so vivid and his wording fanominal. Read this story and your beliefs on time travel and the way earth will turn out in the future will change. H.G. Wells gives you somthing to ponder while you enjoy the sentences that flow together like the river he describes. H.G. Wells makes an unknown world seem familiar and is an expert in his proffesion. I guaranty this book will send powerful astonishment and awe up and through your mind.

First published in 1895, THE TIME MACHINE was Wells' first novel--and it immediately established him at the forefront of writers of his era. And although Wells would go onto a very long and distinguished career that included some one hundred published books, THE TIME MACHINE remains one of his most popular novels to this day.

The story has been famous for over one hundred years. The narrator, identified only as "The Time Traveler," has created a machine capable of moving through time. He boards the machine and rushes headlong into the future--where he finds himself in the strangely utopian society of the "Eloi." But unbeknownst to the time traveler, that society is built on the back of a much darker one, the underground world of the "Morlock," who supply the Eloi's every need in order to harvest them like cattle.

Wells was an extremely didactic writer, a social reformer whose thoughts inform virtually everything he wrote. In many respects THE TIME MACHINE is the perfect example of this, drawing the reader in through an exciting story that Wells turns into a social parable. Born under the rigid class system of Victorian England, Wells had quite a lot to say about the benefits and evils of such a social system, and his thoughts on the subject are extremely clear here--as are his thoughts about the then-new theory of natural selection. The result is an elegant but often fearsome portrait of how class systems and natural selection might combine to create a uniquely horrific civilization.

Wells would return to these themes again and again, perhaps most obviously in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU and THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON--both excellent novels in their own right. But if you are new to Wells, THE TIME MACHINE is an excellent beginning, for it offers a sampling of his mind in remarkably concise fashion. Strongly recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

A psychologist builds and uses a time machine to travel 800,000-30 million years into the future. It is made of Ivory, Crystal, and Nickel, with two levers for control. I found his turning the hypocritical Victorian society inside out to be refreshing and made the book a fast page turner. His not using overly technical language was another plus. The future society he described was intruiging and scary in its extremes. The gentle Eloi being taken care of by the slavish Morlocks makes the reader think of other historical eras where the few parasitically lived off the many. Feudalism and Communism come to mind. But, in this world the Eloi send their own on a regular basis to be fed to the canabalistic Morlocks. This book makes the reader think and encourages one to want to read more about both history and other fiction novels. For that alone, it deserves four and a half stars.

This is Wells' (1866-1946) first novel. It is a social allegory in which the unnamed hero travels to the year 802701 and finds an Earth completely altered. It appears initially to be a form of utopia but the Traveler soon discovers that this is far from true. Society has two classes. The Morlocks, subterreanean workers, are beings evolved from man that have sunk to depravity and who prey on the decadent Eloi. The Eloi are completely useless beings, totally dependent on the Morlocks. Wells is suggesting a world in which the two main classes of Britain of the 1890s have degraded into Morlocks and Eloi. The world of 802701 is the end result of unrestrained and unchecked class struggles and isolation. The upper class has degraded to uselessness and the lower class has become buried by their labor and degenerate into darkness. The term "Morlock" is derived from the Biblical word "Molech," the epithet of a deity to whom children were offered as sacrifices. "Eloi" comes from the Hebrew for "my God" and is associated with an important phrase in the Bible (a rendering of the first verse of Psalm 22 is "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani" ["My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me"], a phrase heard again in Mark 15:34). Thus, both terms are appropriate descriptions of the two classes. Are the Eloi forsaken? Or, will the Traveler return to help them? Although this is probably the first novel containing a time machine, it is not the first time traveling novel. Both Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889) and Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" (1843) precede it. In de Grainville's "The Last Man" (1805), a Frenchman views future events through a mirror; he doesn't actually travel through time. Finally, to the reviewer of Jan. 24, 1999, from New York, there is a reason why the Traveler remains unnamed! Can you see it?

The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells is an unconventional book, which is both intriguing and entertaining. When I read the book I expected a short novel about various insignificant complications of time travel, but was given a tale full of theories and speculations about the evolution of human beings.

In The Time Machine the time traveler is recounting his adventure into the unknown that we call the future. Thousands of years in the future he discovers that the human race has evolved into two different kinds, the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Morlocks are nocturnal creatures who live underground and surface during the night, only to prey on the defenseless Eloi. The Eloi, once living comfortably as the ruling race, have degenerated into a simple group of beings that live life effortlessly and without substance. The time traveler describes his interactions with the Morlocks and the Eloi in a thought-provoking manner, creating a highly enjoyable novel.

The Time Machine suggests many controversial ideas such as the extreme degeneration of the human race. Not only is it interesting to learn Wells' theories, but his writing caused me to create some of my own thoughts about the possibility of evolution. The open ending to the book also leaves a story for the mind to explore. Facts are not forced upon the reader, but rather he is left to make his own assumptions of the ending of the book. The story is left somewhat unfinished, yet it comes to adequate closure, so that the reader does not feel a lack of conclusion in the novel.

I was thoroughly impressed by the concise yet engaging writing by Wells, and believe that this classic would be a necessity in the personal library of any fan of good literature.

H.G. Wells' timeless novel, "The Time Machine," was a great book and well worth my TIME. You will wish some elements of this story were real so you could go back and read it again and again. This story is about a man who studys about the 4th dimension (time). He comes up with a remarkable idea and decides to build a time machine! With this machine, he is able to travel forwards or backwards in time. He travels way into the distant future, about 803 thousand years from now. He lands in a mystical place with gentle, little inhabitants called the "Eloi." They are human-like people that have evolved over time. On his journey, he is faced with many qualms and incorrigible situations. How does he deal with these problems? Does he make it back to his old time dimension? Read the book to find out...

I particularly enjoyed this book because it kept me wondering and on the edge of my seat. It also stretched my imagination so much, as if I were back in the third grade! H.G. Wells' vivid interpretations of the future were interesting and suspenseful; For those reasons, "I dub thee 4 stars."