The Time Machine
A Victorian inventor travels to the year 802,701 and finds a gentle, childlike people living above ground, and something else living below. The book that invented time travel stories. By H. G. Wells (1895). A public-domain classic.
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How it begins IntroductionThe 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 burnt 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. Keep reading →About this story
A Victorian inventor, known only as the Time Traveller, tells his dinner guests that he has built a machine that moves through time. A week later he comes back late, dishevelled and exhausted, and gives them an account of what he found in the year 802,701.
H. G. Wells published it in 1895, and it was his first novel. It popularised the idea of a machine you can sit in and set to a date. But it is not mainly about the gadget: Wells uses the far future to ask where the class divisions of his own time might lead if nobody tried to change them.
- Themes
- Time, class, evolution, the future of humanity
- Good for
- Short science fiction at its source; readers who like big ideas
- Worth noticing
- What the Time Traveller guesses about the future at first, and how he has to revise it.
Chapters
- 1Introduction8 min · 8 Oct
- 2The Machine6 min · 8 Oct
- 3The Time Traveller Returns9 min · 8 Oct
- 4Time Travelling10 min · 8 Oct
- 5In the Golden Age8 min · 8 Oct
- 6The Sunset of Mankind10 min · 8 Oct
- 7A Sudden Shock11 min · 8 Oct
- 8Explanation19 min · 8 Oct
- 9The Morlocks10 min · 8 Oct
- 10When Night Came11 min · 8 Oct
- 11The Palace of Green Porcelain11 min · 8 Oct
- 12In the Darkness12 min · 8 Oct
- 13The Trap of the White Sphinx5 min · 8 Oct
- 14The Further Vision9 min · 8 Oct
- 15The Time Traveller's Return3 min · 8 Oct
- 16After the Story7 min · 8 Oct
- 17Epilogue2 min · 8 Oct