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The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, Fiction, Classics Hardcover – January 1, 2004
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Wells touches gently on time travel as a notion, but mostly The Time Machine is about the terminal future he sees for mankind: His nameless time traveler ventures to the world that will be 802,701 A.D., And there he finds mankind divided among the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are a gentle, winsome, idle race, who do not labor; the Morlocks, in contrast, are a barbaric race -- who use the Eloi for food. It's a grim vision, and a gripping one. There's a reason that The Time Machine has become a classic.
- Print length124 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWildside Press
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2004
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions6.28 x 0.63 x 9.32 inches
- ISBN-100809596431
- ISBN-13978-0809596430
- Lexile measureGN350L
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- Publisher : Wildside Press (January 1, 2004)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 124 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0809596431
- ISBN-13 : 978-0809596430
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Lexile measure : GN350L
- Item Weight : 12.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.28 x 0.63 x 9.32 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #8,423,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9,231 in Classic Action & Adventure (Books)
- #81,040 in Science Fiction Adventures
- #138,020 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors

The son of a professional cricketer and a lady's maid, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) served apprenticeships as a draper and a chemist's assistant before winning a scholarship to the prestigious Normal School of Science in London. While he is best remembered for his groundbreaking science fiction novels, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells also wrote extensively on politics and social matters and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of his day.

Nicholas Ruddick was born in 1952 in Salford, near Manchester, England and moved to Canada in 1974. From 1982-2017 he taught at the University of Regina, where he is now an Emeritus Professor of English. He's known both as a science fiction critic and as an editor of scholarly editions of novels written near the turn of the twentieth century. He's married to the Swedish-Canadian novelist Britt Holmström.

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The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, is a thrilling science fiction novel revolving around the story of a man only known as the "Time Traveler.” Throughout the story the narrator does not reveal his name, nor do any of the other characters in the book. Neither does he reveal the name of the time traveler and many other guests that appear in the background. Everyone has a certain title for which they are known for. The story starts off with the “Time Traveler” inviting a couple intelligent people to a small gathering or party. He shows them a mock of what he believes to be a time machine. No larger than a cubic foot it was described as. He explained how everything was to work. How the universe was is a four dimensional realm with time being the fourth dimension and a plane that could be traveled across. After a short demonstration of how the miniature model worked, he stunned the audience leaving them with nothing but questions. After a short dinner and questions asked by the group, he invited them all back in a couple of weeks to another dinner.
Most of the previous group returned along with a few new people. The dinner started without the time traveler present. He was nowhere to be found at the moment. All of a sudden the door is slammed open with the time traveler walking through the door appearing to be extremely tired and somewhat injured. He says very little walks upstairs saying that he will redress and invites everyone down to the smoke room. After seating everyone and silencing any questions, he says that he has a story to tell. If anyone shall interrupt his story with a question, they should leave now for he will not tell it. Everyone is quiet and settled so he begins.
He starts off by saying how he finished his machine and how proud he was. He boards his machine to test it and experience what the future holds. He flips his switches and everything turns into a mist or dust. His chest was under immense pressure as he saw everything speed across his vision. Faster and faster things went and moved. Soon day and night went by so fast that it looked like a still picture. His dials for hundreds and thousands of years were moving quite quickly until eventually he felt that he could endure no more and turned it off. He stopped on the near end of the year 800,000. He walked out of a couple shrubs to be greeted by what looked like a large marble statue of a phoenix. He was rather amazed that there were no tall and momentous skyscrapers to be anywhere in site. He was dumbfounded at the small and decorative buildings that scattered across the hillside thought to be made by humans. He encounters a small and soft race of creatures that he believes to be an evolved human race. The gentle race greets him and shows him their common area and food source. As night approaches he decides to sleep in the new world. He sleeps outside away from the gentle creatures and wakes to his time machine having disappeared. He sees the drag marks on the ground from the large thing and deducts that it was dragged into the bronze plates on the base of the phoenix.
Frustrated he finds things to busy himself with. Days pass and he even saves a little creature from the current of the river. He thinks her name is weena and explores the landscape with her. They find wells dotting the landscape with air rushing in or out of them. He finds small plate like handles going down them and decides to leave weena for a moment and explore further. In the well it is pitch black with virtually no light to be seen. He lights a match to find these hideous pale white and fuzzy creatures. They have large eyes and scatter from the light leading the time traveler believe that they are nocturnal. When the light goes out the touch him and try to grab him, but the time traveler was faster and stronger. Able to fend off the creatures he hurriedly makes his way back up the well. He finds that the little creatures are also afraid of the darkness and the wells.
He makes his way with Weena to what looks like a green porcelain palace. Through further investigation he finds out that it is an ancient museum with many relics in airtight containers. He salvages what he could including more matches for he had used all of his. He finds a club like bar for a weapon and a tool to open the phoenix. As he makes his way out night falls upon them and tries to make his way to what he thinks might be safe area. The Creatures of the night befall upon them and it is a fight for him. Throwing explosive material and setting fires, he runs with weena.
Through the confusion he loses her but makes his way to the bronze phoenix with its doors open. As he suspected just after walking in, the doors close leaving him trapped. Fighting the creatures back he makes his way into the time machine’s harness and sets sail forward in time once again. Now the sun doesn't move and a moon is not in sight. Large cretaceous creatures are everywhere and try to kill the traveler. Forward in time more and more little changes until on his last trip forward the air is toxic making it very difficult for him to move. The only thing left in sight was the grass, the ocean, and the sun. He hurriedly makes his return lever activate and zooms back in time.
This is the end of the Time traveler's story and so he bids his guests goodnight. The narrator is left intrigued and asks a question or two after everyone leaves about how it was, and the response was a smile. The narrator goes to visit the traveler once more but he gone. Puzzled and wondering when, if ever he will return. The narrator then mentions that as he tells us this story it has been a couple years since the travelers disappearance.
I personally loved this book and implore anyone and everyone to read it. It was suspenseful and exciting. An extremely complex vocabulary with a couple great quotes to be mentioned, this short read was one of my favorites. I quite enjoyed how the author told this story from a unique point of view and left me wondering. This was a short story but as I have tried, it cannot be summarized into something small. This book captured my mind and made me excited about what cheery thing was going to happen next or what travesty was to befall upon weena and the traveler. I give this book and easy 4-5 star rating.
I read this years ago, a child's version, and found it much the same as I remembered, though reading with fresh eyes. Originally I focused on the time travel alone, and the surprises inherent in the Time Traveler's tale. Knowing the plot now let me focus more on the style, subtleties, and more.
It's an interesting story, narrated by both the Traveler and a guest at his home. By today's standards of explosions, nudity, and profanity, it's tame and slow moving. As a classic tale and social commentary, it holds up well over time though the guests seem interchangeable.
The writing is old fashioned yet lovely, leading me to use the Kindle dictionary feature more than usual for unknown words. An example of the writing:
"The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue."
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Reviewed in India on September 23, 2023
The Penguin edition comes with a concise six-page biography of the author (by Patrick Parrinder); a fourteen-page introduction (as usual, best read AFTER the novella) by Marina Warner; a note on the text; and endnotes to assist the reader. Warner notes Wells's "inspired move as a storyteller was to distance himself completely from the occult and the uncanny so prevalent in the fin de siècle when he started ... He is not looking to give his readers the thrill of the paranormal or to make us shiver at the mysteries of the unknown; he rather presents marvels as knowable, introduces us to wonders of nature and the universe as revealed by reason." He substitutes magic with - in his own words - `scientific patter'.
This edition also comes with Wells's later 1931 preface as a separate appendix. In this Wells wrote of this work as "a slender story springs from a very profound root ... my opening exposition escapes along the line of paradox to an imaginative romance stamped with many characteristics of the Stevenson and early-Kipling period in which it was written."
Indeed, Wells's success is partly down to his ability to write convincingly of science in a societal setting, but also his ability to do with a literary flare: soon into the novella one comes across such phrases as "slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances". Allied to this is his ability to make science human, instilling into his works the recognisable thoughts and feelings of everyday men and women. Thus when in the far future his protagonist finds his time machine taken into custody, the narrator remarks how, "Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it."
If I was to write a story about time travel I am sure I would take advantage of the past and the near future to want to exploit events to make a point or two about contemporary issues and ways of seeing the world. Yet Wells eschews this temptation and takes us not just hundreds of years into the future, but hundreds of thousands of years, thus allowing a broader philosophical commentary on humanity and civilisation in general.
Indeed, the introduction by Marina Warner points us to Wells incorporating into `The Time Machine' his responses to the current theories of thinkers such as Grant Allen, George Howard Darwin, Francis Galton, and TH Huxley. Wells foresaw the workers in society eventually being forced to live underground as the rich enclosed greater portions of the surface of the planet. (For all his supposed foresight, it is unfortunate that he did not see the `humour' of naming his female protagonist Weena.)
The power of the evolved workers over the evolved rich in this future age also reflects his fears about the demise of intellectualism. He sees the beautiful, fair-skinned, young on the planet's surface of the future as decadent and thoughtless because of their prior indulgence in leisure without deliberation: "It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble ... There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change."
I hope this review has shown how more informed the reader becomes by purchasing an edition that also comes with the thoughts on the work by others and which also incorporates the thoughts of the author himself. It granted this reader a more rewarding experience of reading this long short-story.












