The Time Machine Summary: Wells's Journey to the Year 802,701
What The Time Machine is about
H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895. It is a short science fiction novella, and it is the book that gave the English language the phrase "time machine". Wells coined the term, and the idea of a vehicle that carries a person deliberately forwards or backwards through time comes largely from this book.
The structure is a frame story. A group of men gather for a weekly dinner in Victorian England. Their host, named only as the Time Traveller, tells them he has built a machine that moves through time. He produces a small working model and they watch it vanish. A full-size version, he says, is nearly finished in his laboratory.
At the following week's dinner the Time Traveller turns up exhausted and dishevelled. The rest of the book is his account of where he has been. He has travelled to the year 802,701. His house is long gone, replaced by lush garden. The people he finds there are small, gentle and childlike. They call themselves the Eloi. They live in large decaying buildings, eat fruit, own nothing, and show no curiosity at all. There is no economy, no family structure, no visible work. At first the Traveller concludes that humanity has finally solved its problems.
Then he notices what the Eloi are frightened of. They dread moonless nights. They avoid the empty wells that dot the landscape. His machine goes missing. Working out what has happened to it leads him underground, and to a far darker reading of what this future actually is.
The main characters
The Time Traveller is never named. He is a Victorian scientist and gentleman, analytical by habit, and he narrates most of the book himself through the frame of his dinner party. He theorises constantly, revising his conclusions as the evidence changes. That habit of reasoning aloud is the engine of the story.
The Eloi are the surface dwellers of 802,701: fair, small, weak and naive, with no discipline and no understanding of their own world. The Traveller argues that intelligence springs from necessity, and that with no challenges left the Eloi have simply devolved.
Weena is an Eloi woman the Traveller saves from drowning while the other Eloi watch without interest. She becomes his companion. He begins to plan to bring her back to his own century to spare her what is coming.
The Morlocks live below ground. They are ape-like, pale, adapted to darkness, and they surface only at night. They operate the machinery that keeps the surface paradise running. The Traveller's eventual conclusion is that the human race has split into two species, the favoured aristocracy becoming the Eloi and the servant class becoming the Morlocks.
The themes
Class is the spine of the book. Wells takes the industrial division of his own century, owners above and labourers below, and projects it forwards until it becomes biology. The leisured class is bred into helplessness. The working class is bred into the dark. Neither outcome is a victory. A reviewer in 1895, Israel Zangwill, complained that the book was really about "our present discontents", and Wells did not disagree. In a 1933 preface he described the novella as "another assault on human self-satisfaction", written "consciously grim, under the influence of Swift's tradition". He named Jonathan Swift as a lifelong influence and admitted a predisposition to make stories reflect on contemporary political argument.
Survival and power run alongside that. The Eloi have comfort without control. The Morlocks have control without daylight. The Traveller, armed with little more than matches found in a derelict museum, has to relearn the basic skills of staying alive.
Then there is deep time. Wells is interested in what happens to life at scales no human society can imagine, and the final stretch of the journey abandons politics entirely for something colder.
How it ends
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The Morlocks hunt the Eloi for food. The Traveller fights his way towards his machine, and during a night attack in a forest a fire he lit for protection spreads out of control. Weena and the Morlocks are lost in the blaze. He reaches the machine, reattaches the levers he had removed, and flees forward instead of back. He sees Earth roughly thirty million years on: crab-like creatures on blood-red beaches, lichen-covered ground, and eventually a dying sun over a silent, freezing world. He returns home three hours after he left, arrives late to his own dinner, and produces two strange white flowers that Weena had put in his pocket. The narrator calls the next day and finds him preparing for another journey. Three years later he has not come back.
Why it still matters
Wells himself was dismissive of it in 1931, calling it "a very undergraduate performance", though he added that he felt no remorse for the effort. Critics have been kinder. Marina Warner judged it the most significant contribution to understanding fragments of desire before Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, and read in it a man searching for a door he once opened on a luminous vision and could never find again.
It has been filmed twice as a feature, adapted twice for television, and turned into comics many times over, and its influence on later science fiction is impossible to separate out. It suits readers who want political argument inside an adventure, anyone curious about where modern time travel fiction began, and anyone who likes their futures bleak rather than hopeful. It is short, it moves fast, and it never softens its conclusion.
More: More H.G. Wells posters