Publisher's Synopsis
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Time Machine, the first novel by H. G. Wells, is a "scientific romance" that reverses the 19th-century belief in evolution as progress. The story follows a Victorian scientist, who claims to have invented a device that allows him to travel through time and has visited the future, arriving in the year 802,701 in what was once London. There, he meets the future race, or, more exactly, the races, because the human species has "evolved" in two different ways. Above the ground live the Eloi, childish, gentle, fairy-like creatures whose existence seems to be free from fighting. However, there is another race of beings: the Morlocks, underground inhabitants who, once subordinate, now prey on the weak and defenseless Eloi. By setting the action nearly a million years into the future, Wells was illustrating the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection, "fast-forwarding" through the slow process of changes in species, the physical world, and the solar system.
The novel is a class fable, as well as a scientific parable, in which the two societies of Wells's own period (the upper classes and the "lower classes") are reformulated as equally, albeit differently, "degenerate" beings. . The "degeneration" is an evolution in reverse, whereas Wells's dystopian vision in The Time Machine is a deliberate discrediting of late 19th century utopian fictions, notably William Morris's News from Nowhere. While Morris represents a pastoral socialist utopia, Wells represents a world in which the human struggle is doomed.
