The Time Machine (Signet Classics)
by H.G. Wells
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Book Summary Information
Author: H.G. WellsIntroduction: Greg Bear
Edition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-10-01
ISBN: 0451528557
Number of pages: 144
Publisher: New American Library
Book Reviews of The Time Machine (Signet Classics)
Book Review: SHAMAN
Summary: 5 Stars
They seek him now, they seek him then,
They seek the blighter everywhen.
If in some future age he's dead,
About him now what's to be said?
Time travel stories since Wells wrote have become far cleverer and more sophisticated than The Time Machine, but I have never yet read one to equal it. Wells does not contort his or his reader's mind round the now-familiar paradoxes. How is any era visited or returned to by a time-traveller affected by the visit or the return? If objects from the future are brought back to the present, i.e. before they existed, does that do anything to the objects or to their pre-existence environment? Wells keeps all that sort of thing simple. In his schematic storyteller's view time is just like a dimension of space. If you are some variety of Professor Potty and can invent a machine to travel in time, then you can just go to your destination and come back from it as if you were taking a day return trip on the train from Banstead to London.
It presumably should go without saying nowadays that whether or not The Time Machine is properly catalogued as `science fiction' it is not about science. The time traveller has a splendid-sounding Victorian conveyance distinguished by such hi-tech appurtenances as brass rods, ivory levers and quartz doofers of some less specified kind. Security is minimal, as the machine is an open single-seater with the control levers removeable to prevent unauthorised use -- a very sound precaution, as all anyone would need to do is move the levers and head off up or down the aeons, no previous training or experience necessary.
For anyone not yet familiar with the plot, I am not going to spoil it for him or her via a review. However any reviewer can hardly avoid commenting on the societal vision that Wells offers, starting with his first stopping-off point 800693 years from the date of my writing this. The scenario of the division of humanity into two simple and drastically differentiated categories obviously owes much to contemporary analysis of society and history on a class basis. However it is about as far from being Marxian, from that point on, as I can well imagine. Marx was an optimist, at least from a certain point of view. He argued that if the urban proletariat, which had nothing to lose but its chains, could only divest itself of the latter a certain kind of utopia could be established in which all would provide according to their ability and receive according to their need. The mind of Wells was darker than this, and his grim visions, like Stapledon's some time later, found creative expression in this tale of unforgettable vividness, simplicity and pessimism, but at the same time also beauty.
For me, The Time Machine represents another kind of short journey backwards. It takes me back to the golden era of Victorian prose. Wells had, says Brian Alldiss, practically every gift that a novelist can have; and to that I shall add only that he is a great writer as well as a great novelist. There is real poetry in Wells's prose at its best, and by that I do not suggest any affectation or gratuitous ornament in the style. What I mean is that the story, contained mainly within quotation marks as the time-traveller recounts his three experiences of the far future, reminds me forcibly of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wells found no redemption, and his final book was called Mind at the End of its Tether. If it is any use my saying so to him from the future, I hope some benevolent deity saved him from the fiends that plagued him thus. For the rest of us, the dangers that we are creating for ourselves are not those foreseen hypothetically by Wells. I only hope they are not a great deal worse.
Summary of The Time Machine (Signet Classics)
The story that launched Wells's successful career-the classic tale of the Time Traveler and the extraordinary world he discovers in the far distant future. A haunting portrayal of Darwin's evolutionary theory carried to a terrible conclusion.Classics Books
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