The Time Machine

“[T]he little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone—vanished!”

This is the first amazing event in the story. It serves as a preview of astonishing things to come. It is also a description of how an object might appear from the outside as it vanishes into the past or future. The details of the event add a sense of realism and plausibility, hallmarks of science fiction writing.

“He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer—either with dust and dirt or because its colour had faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it—a cut half-healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps. We stared at him in silence […].”

The Time Traveller appears before his group of companions as though he has just escaped from an extraordinary experience. Each of the details of his dishevelment portends an event within a story of great adventure. It is a grand entrance, and it inspires bewilderment and curiosity, both in the minds of the Traveller’s guests and in the minds of readers. The author displays a knack for keeping his audience enthralled.

“‘I will,’ he went on, ‘tell you the story of what has happened to me […] Most of it will sound like lying. So be it! It’s true—every word of it, all the same. I was in my laboratory at four o’clock, and since then… I’ve lived eight days… such days as no human being ever lived before!’”

With these words, the Time Traveller begins his story. That he was working in his lab only that afternoon and has since had a weeklong adventure suggests that the Time Machine worked: The machine took him to some distant point in time, and it brought him back again to the very day on which he started the journey.

“Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue. The landscape was misty and vague.”

The machine accelerates, and the Time Traveller rushes forward in time faster and faster; days move in a blur until years hurry past. It is a vivid description of what someone in that position might see; as such, it testifies to the author’s imagination and his ability as a futurist to reason out and describe the effects of a plausible technology. This skill set him apart from other writers in 1895, and his book—and the ones to follow—would become popular precisely for their inspiringly adventurous and thought-provoking scenes.

“I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children—asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.”

He had hoped, after traveling far into the future, to learn new things from a race of super-advanced humans, but instead the Time Traveller meets the Eloi, a civilization of frail, childlike beings. Rather than a marvelous future, he learns that a slow, creeping disaster awaits if humanity continues down its capitalism-driven path without change.

“I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions. Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.”

Apparently, the future is perfect, and there is no longer any need in humanity for strength, intelligence, and the drive to achieve. The people have atrophied into happy, listless simpletons. Thus, perfection leads to a strange sort of decay.

“When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realized. Not a trace of the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with my hands clutching my hair. Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay.”

Someone has stolen the time machine. Without it, the Traveller can never return to his time and people. The thief cannot be among the childlike people he has met because they are too weak and lack ambition. Thus, there are more players in this civilization than he has yet seen, and he now faces the double dangers of no escape and hidden menace.

“I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.”

The Time Traveller admits of a kind of impatience common to Western societies. He likes to move forward on problems and solve them, rather than wait for circumstances to change. This active, enterprising attitude, also somewhat aggressive, contrasts with the sweet and passive Eloi. These qualities make him somewhat like his malevolent hidden opponents, the Morlocks.

“Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised. Although it was at my own expense, I could not help myself. I laughed aloud.”

His time machine missing, the Traveller finds himself in the ironic position of wanting to escape the very thing he has spent years trying to accomplish. It is an object lesson in how the best-laid plans often go awry in surprising ways. To have a new experience requires the willingness for it to be new—unpredictable and full of predicaments.

“So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. […] Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.”

Wells projects ideas about class conflict into the far future, where he envisions not a utopia of high technology but a dystopic world split into two races of humans—one that enjoys untrammeled pleasure at the cost of being food for the other. The Eloi are like free-range animals who eventually must report to the barn for slaughter.

“I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine, lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a peculiar unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me […] I will confess I was horribly frightened. I determined to strike another match and escape under the protection of its glare. I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel. But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.”

The Time Traveller visits the underground Morlock world, where the denizens examine him, perhaps to gauge his meat content. This scene adds a dose of terror to a novel about the future. The author shows off his ability to weld together sci-fi, adventure, and horror in one scene.

“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes.”

During a nighttime trek through a dark forest, the Traveller realizes that his problems pale in comparison to the regal progress of the stars and the slowly shifting tilt of the Earth during its endless trips around the sun. This insight reminds him that, in the far future, the grand ventures of humanity are long gone, swept away by time and replaced by the vapid Eloi and their ravenous caretakers, the Morlocks.

“These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon—probably saw to the breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at my side!”

The Traveller realizes what is left of humanity 800,000 years in the future: on the one hand, tasty farm animals; on the other, the farmers who eat them. This dynamic reflects social divisions that exist in the Traveller’s time, demonstrating how contemporary inequities may only become more exaggerated without change.

“I rejoined her with a mace in my hand more than sufficient, I judged, for any Morlock skull I might encounter. And I longed very much to kill a Morlock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one’s own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things.”

While visiting the machine room in the museum within the Palace of Green Porcelain, the Traveller remembers his need for a protective weapon, and he obtains one by breaking off a lever from one of the machines. For a moment he ponders the irony of wishing ill upon his distant descendants.

“I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms, and pulled down. It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous spider’s web. I was overpowered, and went down. I felt little teeth nipping at my neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came against my iron lever. It gave me strength. I struggled up, shaking the human rats from me, and, holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces might be.”

Attacked in the dark by Morlocks, the Traveller feels the terror known to countless generations of Eloi in the moments before their death at the hands of their underground wardens. Unlike the Eloi, though, he is far from passive and struggles his way out of the ape’s grip. Also unlike them, he is willing to fight and to kill.

“And like blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Under-world. I understood now what all the beauty of the Over-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same. I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”

Looking out on the landscape he has visited for several days, the Time Traveller realizes that all this beauty hides the vicious secret of the world beneath it. He knows that humanity, far into the future, has devolved into apish farmers who tend other humans as a food source. The perfection of human development flips over into a nightmarish finale when the conquerors of the world and its resources become the conquered.

“Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. […] The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.”

Here, the Traveller sets forth his theory of the devolution of humankind as he finds it hundreds of thousands of years in the future. The theory is didactic, intended as a warning about what might happen to a society of “haves” who indulge their whims to the exclusion of the “have-nots.” The upshot is a civilization nightmarish for both sides.

“I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect.”

The time machine travels millions of years into the future, when nothing human exists, the atmosphere has grown thin, and the Earth no longer spins but is tidally locked to a large red sun. This is a doomsday vision of the future, a desolate planet whose mindless existence mocks the grand visions of the people who once inhabited it.

“As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black. A horror of this great darkness came on me.”

The Time Traveller, far in the future, witnesses an eclipse of the dimming sun and recoils in horror. The eclipse seems somehow to symbolize for him the desolation that awaits the Earth eons from now. The tail end of life on our planet makes meaningless the dreams of humanity for an Earthly Eden; the relentless workings of time finally erase all our efforts.

“I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest.”

Aside from a couple of large, partially crushed flowers and partly healed injuries to his knuckles, the Time Traveller has no evidence to validate his story of time travel. He is well aware of this and of the ironies it introduces into his life and friendships. However, he also seems not to be very troubled by these problems. Regardless of its veracity, the story still prompts listeners to ponder humanity’s fate—and if nothing else, it still serves to entertain.

“The Editor stood up with a sigh. “What a pity it is you’re not a writer of stories!” he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller’s shoulder.”

The author both points up the guests’ incredulity and makes a joke about himself. Indeed, the guests are unlikely to believe so fantastic a story. Meanwhile, Wells seems to say, It’s a ripping good yarn, don’t you think? This scene, written by a novelist who is also a futurist, accurately predicts the acclaim soon to arrive at Wells’s doorstep.

“I stayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”

The narrator accidentally witnesses the Traveller and his time machine disappear into the fourth dimension. He becomes the only witness to the truth of the Traveller’s assertions about his adventures with the machine. The story thus ends inconclusively. It remains up to the reader to decide if the tale is real and to wonder about the Time Traveller’s fate.

“Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved?”

The narrator ponders the fate of the man that he, and only he, witnessed traveling into time’s dimension. Given the risks and near misses of the Traveller’s tale to his guests, it is easy to speculate that, on his second voyage through time, he loses his machine or gets killed—or, perhaps, simply continues his travels, endlessly sampling the infinity of time periods that his time machine can visit.