The Time Machine

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1895

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Time Travel

Wells’s The Time Machine is a seminal work of science fiction, spawning many imitators and making time travel commonplace within the genre. However, Wells was not the first writer to envision time travel in a work of fiction. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for example, appeared six years before The Time Machine. Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle,” in which a man falls asleep for 20 years and then awakes to a changed reality, was published in 1819.

What made Wells’s book unique among these similar tales was his emphasis on technology. In The Time Machine, technological details and “science-y” explanations are placed front and center and are intended to amaze and amuse the reader. Significantly, the title of the book itself tells us that the book is about a machine rather than, say, a fantastic journey or a traveler.

The time machine is constructed from an unusual collection of materials. In the inventor’s device, “Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal” (11). These elements receive mention not because Wells possessed some arcane knowledge about how a real time machine might work but because grouping together materials that are both modern (like nickel) and exotic or unusual (like ivory or rock crystal) attracts the reader’s interest and wonder.

Once the idea of a time machine is thus established, imagining the implications of its use gets the author’s full attention. Moving forward in time would make nearby people and objects appear to move rapidly. At a higher speed, the sun would arc across the heavens and be replaced by the night sky in a succession of alternating light and dark. Were the speed of that transition fast enough, day and night would blur together, “merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band” (21).

All things move forward in time at a rate of one second per second; any sudden change in that rate, as in a time machine, might cause physiological disturbances. The Time Traveller finds in time travel “a nightmare sensation of falling” (20), though later he feels “hysterical exhilaration.”

Another possible problem is that the device in which one travels through time remains planted in the same geographical location. Were it to stop its passage through time at a moment when something else occupies that space, the two objects would fatally collide. The Time Traveller knows this but has no solution except to halt his time travel arbitrarily and hope for the best: “with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith” (23). (He survives, of course, or the story would end almost before it began.)

Thus, while the technology of time travel can barely be guessed at, the implications of that travel are open to robust speculation, and this points to another aspect of Wells’s influence on science fiction literature. Wells’s book did more than establish the trope of a time machine. The book’s detailed speculations about what it would be like empirically if there were such a machine, and if one were to use it, became an important model for telling science fiction stories.

The Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor

The 19th century, especially 19th-century England, saw the historic emergence modern, industrial capitalism, and it is no coincidence that capitalism’s greatest observer and critic, Karl Marx, wrote the volumes of Capital while living in London. Various forms of socialism (political movements which attempt to mitigate or pass beyond the perceived social ills introduced by capitalism) were popular in Wells’s day. Wells himself was—though only for a time—a member of the Fabian Society, the most prominent socialist organization in England.

A key point in the analysis of capitalism introduced by Marx is the idea of class struggle—that the interests of the people who own the machines that produce modern commodities are opposed to the interests of the workers who are hired to operate the machines (in an arrangement that Marx called “wage-slavery”). Outside of any economic or political analysis, however, there was also widespread awareness in the 19th century that this new form of production called capitalism created new and acute social ills. The novels of Dickens often revolve around such concerns.

Wells takes this separation of society into “the Capitalist and the Laborer” (55) as the starting point for imagining a future society. The aboveground species and the subterranean species, the Eloi and the Morlocks, respectively represent the two classes after 800,000 years or so of evolution—both social and biological.

Regarding the working class—those who operate the machines—Wells writes: “thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back changed!” (67). These creatures, Morlocks, have great skill with machinery but have become brutes, even resembling animals.

By contrast, the Eloi, descendants of the capitalist class, devolve into creatures defined by the vapid prettiness of their useless, if pleasant, lives. Morlocks—whose eyes adapt to their dark, subterranean world by becoming huge, while their postures grow stooped as they crawl through tunnels and around giant machines—care not at all for their aboveground charges. Lacking protein, the struggling workers discovered that the Eloi have no fear and no ability to resist predation, either. They have lost these qualities because of evolution. For the Morlocks, then, dinner is served, and it’s their own cousins.

Underlying this strange, far-future decay is the great crime of mistreating those who serve the technology that makes a better life possible: “Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labors of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him” (72). In this scenario, people fail to recognize and value the contributions of those who maintain the infrastructure, instead regarding them as unpleasant, inferior, and forgettable. The result is the terrible devolution that slowly ensues.

This theme serves as a warning to readers: Lurking beneath the finery of an elite lifestyle are the resentful and alienated workers who suffer so that others may have a life of ease. The challenge for humankind, then, is to find a way in which all people may partake of the benefits of civilization, lest an unbridgeable gulf open between them.

The Future Descent of Humanity

Wells’s hero, the Time Traveller, discovers that humans eventually attain everything their hearts desire and live in near-perfect happiness and safety. However, this comes at the cost of their civilization and even their freedom and safety. The idea here is that, absent any pushback from reality, and absent any cause for struggle or effort, humankind grows soft and degenerate.

To a people enjoying a perfectly pleasing life, the need for complex culture seems moot. A society that perfects itself begins to conclude that it has no further problems to solve; such a civilization might lull itself into a false sense of security. Future humans could easily forget what made them great: their sturdy willingness to confront problems and rise to the challenge of solving them.

Instead, the Time Traveller finds that “all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence” (71). He locates an ancient museum in which the last artifacts of the great human civilizations have themselves fallen into dusty ruin. The Eloi neither know nor care about their past. They live only for the happy present.

The Traveller finds that these humans of the far-future have become “frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry” (71). Having long ago given up their birthright to autonomous life, they have become sheep-like. Underground, their supposed caretakers, the Morlocks, have evolved into the Eloi’s predators.

Without any assistance from the listless aboveground people, even the Morlocks, their lives permanently cut off from sunlight, cannot fully manage the world’s resources. A simple forest fire started by the Time Traveller is beyond their understanding: Its brightness blinds and disorients them, so that many wander directly into the flames and perish.

In these ways, the perfect life devolves into the untended life, which, in turn, becomes a fatally flawed life. No society ever is perfect, and no matter how wonderful and secure, every civilization requires a lively vigilance against trouble and a robust culture of dynamic response to new problems.