Classic science fiction!
I tend to be scared away from a lot of stuff written pre-1900 due to the style that most writers used. It’s generally just hard to adjust from my modern idioms. That was certainly the case with The Time Machine. It’s still readable, but parts grated on me. Wells was a socialist/communist, who believed that a socialist society could come about through means other than revolution. However, he broke with most socialists who believed that there would be a capitalist class and a worker class. Wells didn’t want that, as he felt that society would be stifled. So he posited a far future, 800,000 years in the future, in which each class has separately evolved. Capital owners evolve into the Eloi, dumb and lazy and devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. And the Morlocks come from the workers, equally dumb, living underground, providing for the Eloi, but also taking away. They are as brainless as the Eloi. The unnamed Time Traveler simply gets on a bicycle with some extra levers and heads to the future and finds this utopia
. After some scrapes with the Morlocks (who instinctively repair his time machine), he heads even further to the future (about 30 million years, because he believed estimates of the earth’s lifespan to be underestimated) when tidal action has stopped the earth’s rotation. There are a few creatures left just before this, but it’s mostly amorphous slime with minimal awareness. And then he comes home and tells the story to a dinner party before even taking a nap.
The Time Machine strikes me less as a story and more is a thinly veiled political argument. I’ve read worse, but as a story it falls flat a lot. The Invisible Man is a much better story. Here, Wells even gives his characters names. He matured a lot as a writer in the couple of years between The Time Machine and this book.
The begins with a bandage swaddled man taking a room at an inn. He’s an ass, but so too seem to be the innkeeper’s wife who runs the place. He’s pushy. He’s cranky. And he’s very very secretive. The townsfolk surreptitiously try to find out what’s up with the guy’s bandages. Of course, none ask him directly, but they do ask leading questions to see what sort of ailment he has. Eventually, he runs out of money to pay. But at the last minute he comes up with the money, coincidentally on the same day as a ghost-like being steal money from the town vicarage. People put two and two together, and in the ensuing melee the man removes his clothing and disappears. He sort of goes mad, attempting to rule the countryside. First by pushing a town drunk to carry the stuff that would reveal him (can’t carry money cause money floating in the air would be a telltale location for him). When the drunk eventually turns on him, he runs into an old colleague and attempts to turn him to his side. But Kemp has other ideas and leads the constabulary to their quarry. But Griffin (the invisible man) escapes again and tries to take out his revenge on Kemp. It could easily have been the plot for Hollow Man. It’s a good cautionary tale about genius thinking it’s better than everyone else. Still I couldn’t help but wonder why Griffin didn’t make a set of invisible clothes. His first experiment was to make a batch of wool invisible. So why not a suit? It would have made his reign of evil actually workable. Almost all his problems occur because he is cold and susceptible to injury when naked and invisible. Not so much the genius are we Griffin?
Title: The time machine ; and, The invisible man
Author: H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells)
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: xxxii, 284 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 1-59308-032-8
Subject: Science fiction, English
Subject: Self-experimentation in medicine — Fiction
Subject: Time travel — Fiction
Subject: Scientists — Fiction
LC classification: PR5774 .T5 2003
