First Published: 1895

Rating: Excellent

"The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us."

It seems like everyone's heard of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine--people know the story even if they haven't actually read the book. But prior knowledge of the plot is no reason not to pick up this powerful classic of science fiction; at less than 200 pages, it's a quick but powerful read that's well worth the time.

The novel's protagonist, known only as the Time Traveller, is a Victorian-era scientist who regularly invites other intellectuals over for discussion. At the beginning of The Time Machine he's teling his colleauges about his newest invention--a machine that can travel through time.

No one but the narrator really believes him, even after he makes a tiny prototype of the machine disappear. But the narrator comes back for a dinner party a few nights later--a party the Time Traveller interrupts by stumbling in bloodied and dazed a half hour later than his note promised his guests he'd join them. After cleaning himself up, he sits down and tells them of the week of time travelling he's experienced since that morning.

The majority of his travels are spent in the year 802,701 A.D., where he meets a gentle race called the Eloi who spend their time at idle pursuits and seem to lack for nothing despite never working. The Time Traveller, stranded when his machine disappears, is fascinated with this intellectually vapid future society, where "so much [is] left of the artistic spirit, and no more." Soon, though, he discovers the Morlock, the subterranean race that has taken possession of his machine--and who, for reasons the Time Traveller slowly comes to understand, keep the Eloi in fear of the night. 

For those who are interested in character-driven stories, The Time Machine might not be your cup of tea--the future society that Wells presents is the point of the story, to the point that few of the characters even have names. But there's a reason the novel is a classic, presenting an ambiguous utopia decades ahead of works like The Dispossessed that would appear in the 1970's. Wells deals with a society that has seemingly freed itself from conflicts of all kinds by pointing out both its triumphs and its flaws.

The Time Machine is full of scientific ideas, but it's not heavy-handed, and it deals more with the social and moral consequences of those ideas. It's neat, and a little creepy, to consider that Wells wrote the novel based on Victorian society and Darwin's then-new theory of natural selection--this and other novels (like The Island of Dr. Moreau) show Wells' foresight when it came to the impact of scientific ideas on the future.

When it comes down to it, there's no excuse not to read The Time Machine--it's a short, tight novel that's fast-paced and has survived as a classic of the science fiction genre for over one hundred years. 

[Buy The Time Machine at Amazon.com] | [Buy H. G. Wells books at BookCloseouts.com]