Publisher's Synopsis
In 1899, Dr. Alexander Hartdegen is an inventor teaching at Columbia University in New York City. Unlike his friend David Philby, Alexander would rather do pure research than work in the world of business. After a mugger kills his fiancée, Emma, he devotes himself to building a time machine that will allow him to travel back in time to save her. When he completes the machine in 1903, he travels back to 1899 and prevents her murder, only to see her killed again when a horseless carriage frightens the horses of a horse-drawn vehicle into running her over.Alexander realizes that any attempt to save Emma will result in her death through other circumstances. Distraught, Alexander travels from 1903 to 2030 to discover whether science has been able to solve his question of how to change the past. At the New York Public Library, a holographic sentient librarian called Vox 114 insists that time travel to the past is impossible and is the realm of fictional authors such as Isaac Asimov and H.G. Wells. Alexander looks up himself and learns that he was reported missing, presumed dead, in 1903 and dismissed as a crackpot. Alexander travels to 2037, when the accidental destruction of the Moon by the lunar colonists' demolition team has begun rendering the Earth virtually uninhabitable through dangerous gravitational fluctuations. While restarting the time machine during a fluctuation earthquake, he is knocked unconscious and accidentally travels to the year 802,701.When Alexander comes to, he learns that Earth has now healed and the human race has reverted to a primitive dystopian[3] lifestyle. Some survivors, called "Eloi", live on the sides of cliffs of what was once Manhattan. Alexander is nursed back to health by a woman named Mara, one of the few Eloi who speak English. He observes the broken moon and suggests that maybe his teachings led to this future. One night, Alexander and Mara's young brother Kalen dream of a frightening, jagged-toothed face and a creature calling their name. Alexander informs Mara of the dream, and she tells him all Eloi have that dream and notices that his watch is missing. The next day, the Eloi are attacked and Mara is dragged underground by ape-like monsters called "Morlocks" that hunt the Eloi for food. In order to rescue her, Kalen leads Alexander to Vox 114, which is run down but still functional after 800,664 years.Vox reveals to Alexander how, after the moon shattered, humanity split into two groups which went down two distinct evolutionary paths. After learning from Vox how to find the Morlocks, Alexander enters their underground lair through an opening that resembles the face in his nightmare. He is captured and thrown into an area where Mara sits in a cage. Alexander meets the Über-Morlock, who explains Morlocks are the descendants of the humans who went underground after the Moon shattered, while the Eloi are descended from those who remained on the surface. The Über-Morlocks are a higher caste of Morlock who rule the other Morlocks, explaining that through generations of selective breeding some Morlocks became hunters, while the Über-Morlocks developed increased intelligence and telepathic abilities to control the hunters. In this fashion, the Über-Morlock also has some telepathic control over the Eloi, keeping them docile enough to be a stable source of food and women to breed with.
