The Time Machine

Wells advanced his social and political ideas in this narrative of a nameless Time Traveller who is hurtled into the year 802,701 by his elaborate ivory, crystal, and brass contraption. The world he finds is peopled by two races: the decadent Eloi, fluttery and useless, are dependent for food, clothing, and shelter on the simian subterranean Morlocks, who prey on them. The two races--whose names are borrowed from the biblical Eli and Moloch--symbolize Wells's vision of the eventual result of unchecked capitalism: a neurasthenic upper class that would eventually be devoured by a proletariat driven to the depths. The Time Machine, H. G. Wells's first novel, is a "scientific romance" that inverts the nineteenth-century belief in evolution as progress. The story follows a Victorian scientist, who claims that he has invented a device that enables him to travel through time, and has visited the future, arriving in the year 802,701 in what had once been London. There, he finds the future race, or, more accurately, races, because the human species has "evolved" into two distinct forms. Above ground live the Eloi--gentle, fairy-like, childish creatures, whose existence appears to be free of struggle. However, another race of beings exists--the Morlocks, underground dwellers who, once subservient, now prey on the feeble, defenseless Eloi. By setting the action nearly a million years in the future, Wells was illustrating the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection, "fast-forwarding" through the slow process of changes to species, the physical world, and the solar system.The novel is a class fable, as well as a scientific parable, in which the two societies of Wells's own period (the upper classes and the "lower orders") are recast as equally, though differently, "degenerate" beings. "Degeneration" is evolution in reverse, while Wells's dystopic vision in The Time Machine is a deliberate debunking of the utopian fictions of the late nineteenth century, in particular William Morris's News from Nowhere. Where Morris depicts a pastoral, socialist utopia, Wells represents a world in which the human struggle is doomed to failure.