Book Review - The Time Machine by H.G Wells

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Books are human’s best friend, as we all listening from the beginning. There is a various genre we can find in books but as time passes and human develops, the interest of people also changes regarding books. This is the era where Science fiction is over everyone’s head and the one who started this was a writer named Herbert George Wells, who is also named as “father of science fiction”. One of his triumphs is “The Time Machine” which was his first book to be published in 1895.

The novel is considered one of the earliest works of science fiction and progenitor of the “time travel” subgenre.

 

Plot summary

 

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The story opens with the time traveler explaining his plans to travel in time to a group of people of different professions. The next scene is of a dinner party hosted by the time traveler a week later where the narrator and few other guests were present. 

Time traveler himself was a little late and after some time he entered the room in a terrible shape. He then changed and devoured his meal like he was hungry for days. Now is the time for him to tell his guests about his time travel trip.

 

Time traveler said, he traveled into the far future in the year 802701 A.D. When he reached there, he found that the whole human civilization was vanished long ago along with most of the animals that were present when he left his presence. After looking around he found a being of around 4 feet tall at first, he seems pretty similar to humans. 

Just after that, a group of similar being approached him, they checked the time traveler like they were seeing a human for the first time. Time travelers thought that these may be the descendent of humans and came to know that their race is called “Eloi”.

 

Time traveler went along with them and later he found that his time machine has been stolen by someone and he is frantic until he came to know that it has been locked in the bronze base of the nearby statue. He gives up on trying to free his time machine and later saves a drowning Eloi named Weena. She now became a friend of him and he soon discovers the existence of another race that is a descendent of humans named “Morlocks”. 

This new race lives beneath the ground and because of this, he thought that both of these races were formed because of the difference in the status of past humans. Eloi maybe those who were superior and Morlocks may be descendent of working-class peoples who chose to live underground a long time ago.

 

He goes off exploring this new world along with Weena and there he found a ruined museum. He searched all over for something useful and later he moved underground where Morlocks were living. Both of them were attacked by Morlocks and in the process of escaping he accidentally started a forest fire and in that chaos, Weena lost her life.

 

 The time traveler makes it back to the statue where his machine was kept and found that doors are open. He gets inside his machine and escaped to a far future that seemed like the end of the world and from there he came back to his presence at the dinner party. The only one who seems to believe his story is the narrator. The next day when the narrator goes to the lab to talk to the time traveler, but he and his machine are gone.

 

Review

 

The time machine is a social wonder. H.G Wells thought of a whole new future and presented it as a place where the earth is blooming and humans are nothing like they used to be. The centuries of soft living life have turned rich into weak and childish creatures. 

On the other hand, the working class has evolved into subterranean strong creatures who are seeking revenge from their masters. Eloi and Morlocks were just opposite from the humans of the present which somehow tells that what the rulers were doing in the late 1880s was not right and may result worse in the future.

 

Although, the book was amazingly written for that time because that was the time when science was just plantlet and humans were unaware of so many things that are known now but for today it has a lot of wrong facts in it. 

According to Wells, Eloi is described as being disease-free but science can only get rid of parasites and viruses and can’t kill off the bacteria otherwise the whole ecosystem will be affected. Over that bacteria mutates so they can’t be killed that easily and it is nearly impossible.

 

The behavior of both the races seems to be unreal like Wells showed that Morlocks were intelligent enough to run machines and lay a trap but they don’t use weapons to hunt the time traveler down. Although Eloi were pretty good in their appearance that was short as science shows humans will grow shorter as we move in the future. The thing Wells showed with menta capability was not acceptable as science says in the future human brain will develop a lot better but here it was the exact opposite of that.

 

Keeping criticism aside, the novel has held very well. Some of Wells’ scientific reasoning was off, but the knowledge of the day was limited. The story is good and fast-paced, and descriptions or explanations are engaging. 

As expected by the father of science fiction, the novel paved the way for a whole lot of really excellent science fiction stories and novels. The time machine literally needs to be read multiple times to get every aspect correctly and the plus part is that a reader won't even regret it reading more than once.

Written By - Dewang Singh

Edited By - Anamika Malik