The Time Machine

Book 144: S.F. MASTERWORKS

by H.G. Wells, New Millennium Audio

Genres: Time Travel

Synopsis

The Time Machine is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. A scientist known only as "The Time Traveler" tells the tale of his voyage to the year 802,701 A.D. and beyond, where he observes the end of human civilization as we know it, as well as the beginning of the end of the world. Generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that permits an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time, this story is hailed as a classic of its genre!

Release date: June 24, 2010

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 128

Sample

INTRODUCTION

The Time Machine, serialised in 1894–1895 in the New Review; and, in an earlier form, some ten years previously in The Science School Journal; finally published by Heinemann in 1895, was Herbert George Wells’ first literary achievement. Critical reaction was mixed, and somewhat bewildered: but H. G. Wells would soon be a writer worthy of Joseph Conrad’s admiration and the upperclass disdain of Virginia Woolf; and also one of the noted public voices of his day. Like the War Of The Worlds scenario, and The Island Of Doctor Moreau, The Time Machine became a twentieth century icon, repeatedly adapted for cinema, TV and radio; and cannibalised (appropriately enough) in numerous steals, riffs and revisionings – notably The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter 1995, the sequel authorised by the Wells Estate; and The Space Machine, Christopher Priest, 1976, in which Priest ingeniously carries the Time Traveller to Mars, to discover the preparations for The War of The Worlds, by improving on Wells’ Spacetime calculations. The original, a surprisingly short work (32,000 words) remains fresh and interesting: brisk, mysterious, and as curiously contrived as the machine itself.

The framing device is that Victorian and Edwardian favourite, a bachelor dinner party. The guests in leafy Richmond, identified only as established professionals (unlike the struggling young H. G. Wells!) – the Editor, the Journalist, the Medical Man – are very ready to appreciate a tall tale. Civilised comforts – silver lilies of champagne flutes, unobtrusive service; the glitter of unlimited candles – contrast strangely with the weird report delivered by their friend the Cool Older Chap; but here familiarity ends. This is not a ghost story, or an account of benighted places where civilisation has not yet penetrated. The Beyond in this case is a time when civilisation is in the past, irrevocably defeated by the Fourth Dimension.

The synopsis is bold and simple. At the first dinner party the Time Traveller, who will never be named, introduces his guests to some bewildering modern ideas. His question ‘Can a cube that does not last for any time at all have a real existence?’ recalls the speculation in Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions (Edwin Abbott, 1884) and proves rather a conversation stopper; but there is more. He produces a meticulously crafted toy, made of ivory, bronze and rock-crystal: the model for a machine that will carry him into the future, or the past. He makes his toy disappear, and reappear. The other gentlemen cough and splutter a bit, and ‘don’t know what to think’. At the second party, the Traveller is absent when the guests assemble. He joins them stumbling, gaunt, wild-eyed, with leaves in his hair and scabbed-over scars on his face. He has just returned from his first trip on the Machine, and recounts a visit to the far future of the Thames Valley: mainly around 800,000 AD, with an excursion about thirty million years beyond. On the third meeting only our narrator (also unnamed) is present. The Time Traveller promises he will explain everything over lunch; and disappears, for a few minutes, into his lab . . .

Movie adaptations (both rather free with the plot) have focused on the adventures of the Time Traveller among the Eloi and the Morlocks. In fact, in the original the adventure element is sparse. Richmond in the year ‘800,701 AD’ does not seem arbitrarily strange for long. The empty, garden landscape – dotted with huge puzzling monuments, inhabited by a race of pretty, miniature humans who ought to be staggeringly ‘advanced’ and ‘superior’ but who clearly are not – is soon deconstructed, by the Time Traveller himself, as the logical conclusion of trends in his own society. The childlike Eloi are what became of Victorian gentlefolk: lolling around in their outsize stately homes, inexplicably idle, feasting on hothouse fruit and decking themselves in superb hothouse flowers. Everything grubby and functional has been removed, aeons since, below-stairs, to an underground world where the equally but differently degenerate Morlock toil. The Morlock have forgotten why they work: they tend the Eloi’s machinery, ant-like, without conscious awareness. The Eloi have forgotten that they ever ruled the world. Arguably, Wells was not yet a Socialist when he conceived this story. He was the talented son of domestic servants, horrified at his own trapped prospects, looking with equal cynicism at both ‘races’. Certainly, the horror of what really happens between Morlock and Eloi is not played for exciting cathartic effect. There is no question of ‘war’ between the post-human sub-species. Only mindless futility provokes the crisis, and propels the Time Traveller to the last, dying shore of Life On Earth.

‘If only I had a companion!’ cries the first Time Lord in fiction, having failed to notice that ‘Weena’, the tiny Eloi woman, his guide in this strange world, has fallen in love. Re-reading The Time Machine for this introduction I found myself muttering you will have, Doctor, you will . . . A Tardis doesn’t look much like a glorified bicycle, a proper Time Lord isn’t human. The Doctor has never yet lost touch with his female sidekick in quite such ghastly circumstances, either: but the connection between H. G. Wells’s concept and the UK’s best-loved sci-fi series is hard to miss, and maybe that’s enough of a legacy for any classic.

Wells recounts that he ‘laid hold of the idea of a four dimensional frame for a fresh apprehension of physical phenomena’ through the debating society at what was to become Imperial College, London. His paper on the subject was rejected as incomprehensible, but gave him the basis for this first ‘scientific fantasia’ – with phenomenal effect for the nascent science fiction genre. The adventure is shrouded in Wellsian pessimism, the Darwinian speculation hijacked for social comment. Even the (fictional) veracity of the Time Traveller’s account is called into question, with hints of a conjurer’s misdirection around the initial disappearing trick and other clues that we ought to suspend belief as well as disbelief. A well-read young Victorian must have known that by citing ivory, in the construction of his Machine, he invoked dreams that are false: rather than the true dreams that come through the gate of horn. Yet this withholding of certainty is one of the rules of the game, and the game remains exactly as our narrator describes it, when analysing the power of the Time Traveller’s tale: to tell a fantastic, incredible story, in such credible and sober style that your audience is willing to listen; and perhaps even to learn.

Gwyneth Jones

1

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way – marking the points with a lean forefinger – as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.

‘You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.’

‘Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?’ said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.

‘I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.’

‘That is all right,’ said the Psychologist.

‘Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.’

‘There I object,’ said Filby. ‘Of course a solid body may exist. All real things—’

‘So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?’

‘Don’t follow you,’ said Filby.

‘Can a cube that does not last for any time at all have a real existence?’

Filby became pensive. ‘Clearly,’ the Time Traveller proceeded, ‘any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and – Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.’

‘That,’ said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; ‘tha. . .