The Time Machine is an 1895 novella about time travel by H. G. Wells. Its full title is The Time Machine—An Invention, which is a reference either to the machine itself, or to the fact Wells made the whole story up.
Image: by Richard Partridge (from his blog at IOO Real People)
Aside from those among the dinner guests, the reader is apprised of the names of two characters. When en passant I pay cursory heed to the tales of Harry Potter and The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings (but not Tom Clancy), I remind myself of this fact: that an entirely gripping story does not need to name its myriad characters. They can have back story, motivation, destiny, antagonists and still lack a name. If you happen to read today about the five million people in Sudan who will be suffering acute hunger by September, ask yourself how many of their names you know, and whether knowing or not knowing their names makes you care, or stop caring.
To the matter at hand (albeit not far removed).
The book’s action is set at two times in the same place (a scientist’s London home), neither of which, interestingly, is in the future. Each occasion is a dinner party, to which someone revealed to us only as the Time Traveller has previously invited certain guests. The guests are mostly referred to by descriptions or their professions: at the first party, we have the Very Young Man, the Provincial Mayor, the Psychologist, the Medical Man. The last of these returns at the second party as the Doctor, as do the Psychologist, and the narrator. They are then joined by three others: “Blank, the Editor aforementioned, a certain journalist, and another—a quiet, shy man with a beard—whom I didn’t know, and who, as far as my observation went, never opened his mouth all the evening.” (Probably me.) All of these characters besides the narrator go unnamed. Expressly so.
At one point, the Time Traveller even asks the narrator, “You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the machine?” and the narrator even later mentions the Time Traveller’s name to the unnamed man-servant, which the author redacts (“Has Mr. —— gone out that way?”). The lengths to which Wells goes in anonymising his tale are fairly extraordinary, to consider that journalists will even frequently invent a name for a story that has to remain anonymous, in order simply to draw the reader in so they can sympathise with the character. Perhaps that is the purpose aimed at here—to deepen the intrigue.
Four other characters (including two of the diners) are, however, named, for no apparent reason. At the first dinner party, there is a certain Filby. Aside from the man-servant, the Time Traveller has a housekeeper, Mrs Watchett. Then, there is the girl with whom the Time Traveller becomes enamoured: her name is Weena and, because she and all her people in the year 802,701 AD are illiterate, we must assume that the author, Wells, also invents how the name is spelled.
Finally, there is the narrator, who is not in fact the Time Traveller. Although the vast majority of the novella comprises the Time Traveller’s experiences, which are related in the first person, the Time Traveller himself is not the narrator. We learn the narrator’s name when the Time Traveller refers to him in an intriguing statement that, as in all time travel stories, needs some thinking about: “Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but he passed like a flash”, a remark whose POV switches at the end of the story, when the narrator himself says, “I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment.”
At the first dinner party, at which the model of the time machine is demonstrated to those present, the conversation among the men circulates around the Time Traveller’s discussion of what time actually is. He calls it a fourth dimension, and one senses the narrative comprising a reflection of Wells’s own investigations into the matter, with discussion of other writers (“Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago”; “Scientific people ... know very well that Time is only a kind of Space”).[1] The novella touches on the philosophical and material question of what would happen if, instead of whizzing through time, the traveller were to halt in a moment when the space he occupies is occupied by something else, such as a rock, but the discussion is not pursued very far. Simply, as long as the traveller continues to travel at more than 60 seconds a minute, his atoms and those of the rock do not fuse.
The core event of the main story essentially focuses on the theft of the time machine once the Time Traveller disembarks from it in the year 802,701. The machine, with which he is able to journey so unhindered through time, is itself a limiting factor when it is displaced beyond his physical reach. Like a cell confines a prisoner in space for a set time, so the spatial movement of the time machine renders the Time Traveller a prisoner in time if its position is moved. Having yearned to travel through time, he even laughs at his own despondency at being trapped in the future every bit as much as he had previously, like us all, been trapped in his own time.
Finally, he is able to access his time machine again (inexplicably, after all his adventures, he finds that the door to the monument into which he had suspected it’s been dragged is wide open, and there is his machine, which he notes, “I was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned.” (One thing the future has in common with now is valet servicing.)
Whilst the Time Traveller reaches interim conclusions about the state of his future world, he initially warns his listeners that these were not his final conclusions, that he was at that stage wrong. By this device, the reader is persuaded to believe that, when he states his final conclusions and absent any such qualification, he is therefore right. However, neither the Time Traveller nor the author himself really offers any great scientific explanation for what the state of the world is said to be, in either the year 802,701 or, indeed, the year 30-or-so million years later, into which the Time Traveller advances before returning to 1895, and the second dinner party.
At one point, the Time Traveller and Weena find themselves in an abandoned museum (where he just happens to find some camphor and, lo!, matches, with which he later starts a forest fire). We nowadays abhor those who visit monuments such as the Colosseum and inscribe their names on their ancient stones, but our Time Traveller is of a similar wanton bent: “I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.” As one does.
The Time Machine is a view of the world that, by its descriptions, seems to differ fundamentally from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is of course science fiction, yet it dwells only momentarily on the science of time travel. It describes some of the materials with which the machine is made (ivory, no less), the physical effects of time travel on the traveller (makes you feel sick), but, unlike Back To The Future, it does not dwell in any way on how the machine actually functions. It is presented simply as a gateway to the future (or the past: when the Time Traveller demonstrates the model—a singular waste of time, if you ask me—he cannot even tell his guests whether the thing has gone backwards or forwards in time).
One question with fantasy stories about impossible science is whether they are truly fantasy or whether they are in fact an allegory for present times. Star Trek has been cited as a presentation box for the American view of the Cold War; Nineteen Eighty-Four was all about 1948. The 1960 Rod Taylor film of The Time Machine leaned into a narrative of nuclear holocaust on his way to the age of the Eloi: its director had the hindsight that Wells lacked in terms of foresight, and inserted into the film a scene redolent of Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (filmed with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner one year previously).
In Back To The Future, what ties us in to the characters is the 60-year time span represented in parts one and two: 30 years back to the parents’ generation; 30 years forward to when the protagonist is an age with his parents now. (The century of time travel in part three works because of the audience’s tie-in to that narrower time span in parts one and two—has anyone ever just seen part three?).
So, why is H. G. Wells so specific about the first year that his Time Traveller travels to? (Note: the second one is “more than thirty million years hence.”) He cites the year (as 802,701—he mentions it four times: as Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd; as Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One, A.D.; as Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One; and as some Eight Hundred Thousand Years hence).
You could say it gives the reader a sense of time and place, the place, of course, being the same London suburb that the Time Traveller starts off in—that much doesn’t change, and that actually forms an element of surprise, as he relates seeing the River Thames and of his walks through Wandsworth, Wimbledon and Battersea. Except, it doesn’t, really: the names are familiar, but there is no link whatsoever to these places as we now known them, and nor in terms of time. One doesn’t have any more sense of the passage of time when talking about 800,000 years from now as when it would be 900,000 years, or, for that matter, only 50,000 years. The size of the figure is somewhat lost on us (just like the word billionaire: “Who Want’s To Be A Millionaire?” is the question Frank Sinatra was asking in 1956; today it’s billionaires who are asking it.)
Assuming the Time Traveller’s musings are correct, the human race has split into two sub-species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. One must assume that 800,000 years is therefore the time Wells reckons it would take for the human race to do such a thing, but, apart from that, the figure has no real significance. The Time Traveller stops in 802,701 almost haphazardly, yet immediately becomes emotionally tied to a person of that precise moment, out of billions of moments when he could have halted. I’m unsure if that says more about the propitious quality of that particular moment than it does about the Time Traveller’s propensity to fall in love. If it’s the latter, one has to ask whether it’s absolutely necessary to time travel 800,806 years into the future to find love.
Far more interesting might be for him to have returned to the era when the Palace of Green Porcelain (where he scribbles his name on the dinosaur) was constructed, and when it fell into disrepair. Although Hillyer (the narrator) leaves us with the conclusion that the Time Traveller never returns from his second trip, one is left wondering whether, even assuming time travel were to be possible, and if its utility were to consist in gaining an understanding of all the things that have befallen the Earth, a single man’s lifetime would even be enough to comprehend what he has achieved in his own allotted time span, let alone in 800,000 years (we can’t even agree when the Egyptian Sphynx was built, which, however you see it, on this scale, was yesterday).
The Time Machine is described as a dystopian novella. Is it?[2] Does it paint a sombre picture of where our existence on this planet is headed for? About one thing, Wells seems to have been prescient, even if he couldn’t have foreseen the causation:
“I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people, unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy; and it may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know it.”
Aside from the temperature (he arrives in the future during a hail storm, but sleeps in the open for a week with no rain), much about life in his Golden Age seems idyllic. The Eloi are vegetarian, the Morlocks carnivores; the Eloi live above ground and are the remnants of a class of indolent aristocrats; the Morlocks operate machinery underground, have enormous eyes and are the remnants of a communist working class, turned tail on their former overlords: they eat the rich. Dystopian, that?
Whilst I don’t especially relish the notion of eating human flesh, it’s been known in even relatively modern times (the Raft of the Medusa, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571) and is generally predicated on an absence of meat from other livestock. In Wells’s Golden Age, there is no livestock: “I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction.” The Eloi enjoy a life of carefree idyll, in exchange for which they get eaten. The Morlocks live, toil and labour underground, and they eat the Eloi (who never grow old or infirm: “aged and infirm among this people there were none”). It’s, when all’s said and done, a fair exchange, not vastly different from modern notions of a ruling class and a professional army, who execute the occasional coup d’état.
Wells’s Time Traveller, and by extension, Wells himself, talks of the Morlocks as an abhorrent species. He is revolted as they touch him and by their appearance. He is almost dismissive of the care and attention they show to his time machine. He has criticism for the Eloi, for their laughter and childlike, carefree simplicity. However, it is striking that he talks about both Eloi and Morlocks as being these people, in a manner similar to how Star Trek’s Captain Kirk would confront aliens on far-flung planets of the Milky Way. Yet these people are not these people: they are us. Wells describes them as he might some foreign race, some inhuman monstrosity, like African savages (a word he uses to describe negroes in the story).[3] But, if the whole purpose of his venture 800,806 years into the future was to learn what becomes of mankind, well, now he knows. It is what becomes of us, here, today.
The Time Traveller bemoans the lack of intellect and advancement in his future Golden Age. He says:
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.
This does, somewhat, border on rank arrogance.[4] For someone appearing out of nowhere in a time machine, coming from the sun in a thunderstorm probably demonstrates a higher level of rationality than supposing that they had come in a time machine.
The dystopia I feel in The Time Machine is not a sense of disappointment in a fantasy future; it is a sense of disappointment in Wells, for there can be little dissociation between the author and the protagonist of his work. Only one element spoils the perfection of the Eloi’s idyll, and that is their being culled as meat for the Morlocks. Only one element spoils the perfection of the idyll of the Morlocks: the fact that they exist in the bowels of the Earth. If inventing a time machine, whether it is as a scientific device or as a story in a novella, were not be in vain, it would be to serve as a spur to humankind in reconciling the stop blocks that these two echelons place in the way of each other’s perfection. And that, Wells concludes, is something that may never be achieved. As he puts it:
“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
It is our intellect that, as Rose says to Charlie in the film The African Queen, differentiates us from the animal world, whose kill-and-cull culture should have no place in human existence: “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on this Earth to rise above.”
To return to where we started, H. G. Wells certainly did not invent a time machine, but did invent this story. I leave you with Wells’s classic self-reference: “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.”
[1] Wells took inspiration from an 1888 short story titled The Chronic Argonauts.
[2] It is, if one considers that, although the Time Traveller has a time machine at his disposal, he is three hours late for his own dinner party.
[3] “Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like?” ... “a civilised man is better off than the savage in this respect.”
[4] In fairness, Wells would much later (1931) describe The Time Machine as “a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks over it once more [... but ...] the writer feels no remorse for this youthful effort.” A fair portion of the Time Traveller’s arrogance can be seen as a projection by the (socialist) author of the work.
Thank you for this overview of the Time Machine, Graham, I always avoided reading it as I do not find science fiction interesting. I reluctantly took my children to see Star Wars movies one and two but by the time the third came out I just paid for their tickets - same with Jurrasic Park.
So after reading your synopsis I don't feel that I have to rush out to read it. Part of my problem is, I've had too much training and education in the sciences to find anything remotely feasible in Sci-Fi.
Time is uni-directional, it can appear to slow down or speed up relative to where you are (Einstein's Theory of Relativity) Theoretically it is possible to travel to the future if you can approach the speed of light but all our observations so far are that as an object approaches that speed it loses some of its mass which then becomes energy, These are things that I think about so sci-fi bores me.
I also have a life long interest in history, I walked out Mel Gibson's Braveheart because he featured the Scots of the 13th century as the Picts prior to the 3rd century.
If you're going to show me a comedy where the only purpose is to make me laugh I'll watch or read nearly anything. But if you're going to depict science or history it better damned well be based on factual evidence. [Another reason I despise trump]
As you can well imagine I can be a very boring critter at times (:-)