H G Wells

The Time Machine H G Wells

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.