About The Time Machine

By H. G. Wells · first published in 1895 · Science Fiction

The Time Machine was H. G. Wells’s first novel, published in 1895 when he was twenty-eight, a former science teacher earning his living as a journalist. It is short, barely a hundred pages, and it introduced an idea that fiction has never let go of: a vehicle that a person can steer backwards and forwards through time.

The story begins in a comfortable house in Richmond, where a man known only as the Time Traveller explains to his sceptical dinner guests that time is a dimension like length or height. A week later he staggers into the same dining room, dusty and limping, and tells them where he has been. He has travelled to the year 802,701 and found humanity divided into two species: the gentle, childlike Eloi who live in the sunlight, and the Morlocks who live underground and come out at night.

Wells was a socialist, and the far future he imagines is a warning about the gap between the rich and the workers of his own Victorian England carried to its end. It is also a gripping adventure with one of the bleakest and most memorable final journeys in science fiction. This preview covers the opening dinner party and the demonstration of the model machine.