↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis’s Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p.It is a fate that neither a primitivist nor a futurist could celebrate. From the richly packed romance between the time traveler and Weena to the unexpected run-ins with a mischievous bunch of evolved humans called Morlocks down to several time trips in an actual time machine. The masters, however, turn out to lose all practical knowledge, and thus are consumed by their own servants. ‘The Time Machine’ is one book that offers a lot of enjoyment to the reader. Huysmans’s Des Esseintes in Against Nature (1884), while the poor degenerate into savage but sharp-witted beasts. Two imagined futures for the human race both come to pass: the rich evolve into delicate, beautiful creatures incapable of exertion, the extreme form of J.K. Published in 1895, this masterpiece of invention captivated readers on the threshold of a new century. Like Wells’s other works of science fiction, The Time Machine speaks to the implications of the theories of evolution and degeneration for social development. The time traveler discovers, to his disgust, that the beautiful but dim-witted Eloi are nothing but “fatted cattle,” whom the Morlocks kidnap at night and then roast and eat in their underground chambers.

Having traveled over 800,000 years into the future, an inventor discovers that “Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals.” The graceful but effete Eloi rule the upper world by day, but underground lives an entirely different species, the Morlocks, ape-like creatures with large eyes, who operate complex machinery and emerge from their lairs only at night.

Wells’s first novel, The Time Machine ( 1895), serves almost as an inverted allegory for the way that the artists of his generation imagined the future, as either technological utopia or reversion to barbaraism. The book’s protagonist is an amateur inventor or scientist living in London identified simply as The Time Traveller.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells