The Time Machine: H.G Wells- Review

“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”

Said the narrator of our story while pondering upon the state of what’s left of humanity or any sentient (if they can be even called that) life on earth, millions of years in the future. Welcome everyone to the review or rather a reflection of what I just witnessed, as one of the most known books on the planet of all time. Written by the father of science fiction, HG Wells, I recently got a chance to read the classic which gave rise to innumerable adaptations and innovations ever since it was first published in 1895. The author came up with an idea and a device which, more than a hundred years later, is a common occurrence in fiction works. Movies, TV series, books; once Wells put the idea of Time Travel out through a Time Machine of sorts, the idea has only continued to gain recognition and sculpted through various means into things ranging from a DeLorean to merely travelling through the mind. I mean it when I tell you that some of the greatest works of art wouldn’t have existed without HG Wells.

In the year, 802,701 A.D., civilisation as we know it has vanished. The world is ruled by only nature and vegetation is all anyone can see anywhere. Forests and some remains of long vanished structures. No animals or humans or insects are left. There exists only two opposing yet interdependent races- The Eloi and the Morlocks.

The Eloi, the time travelling narrator deduces to be the descendants of the upper class humans and the Morlocks are the working class living far beneath the earth. All inhabitants of this world have now lost any sense of intelligence and are only governed by their habits. There is no sense of curiousity or any inclination towards any sort of knowledge at all.

The Eloi spend are akin to children of present, as the narrator suggests, and are only interested in anything for a short while. They play, sing and dance and funnily make love. They are small and waifish and only eat fruits. They don’t use any language presently known to man but have devised their own distinct tongue. Their intellect has been reduced to that of young kids and cannot comprehend anything too complex. They rejoice seeing the narrator light a few matches because fire being an alien concept to them now. They are harmless and only know how to play, give flowers to each other and be at peace. The narrator concludes that when true peace and pacifism took over, the humans who no longer had a conflict with anyone or anything became such fragile and simpleminded creatures. He argues when there is no need of change, human intellect becomes redundant.

The Morlocks, quite contrary to the Eloi, carry more resemblance of the wild beasts of past. But undoubtedly, the narrator assumes, that they are descendants of humans as well. They have just evolved to the conditions they have been used to for millennia. They’ve lived in the underground darkness for so long that their skin has turned pale white and their eyes, large greyish and red. They can see well in darkness but cannot tolerate the daylight anymore.

The narrator consistently speculates the state of affairs and the events that led to this. He, at first, is perplexed as to where the Eloi get their food or clothes as they are a race with no skill at all. Meanwhile, why do the morlcoks come out at night? He hesitantly comes to a ghastly truth. That both these races share a somewhat symbiotic relationship. The morlocks provide food and clothes for the Eloi and in return they feed on them. Why or how this system came into being, would be a fruitless discussion now. The narrator concludes all this is now happening purely because of force of habit and without conscious thought by either race. Morlocks are just as brainless as the Eloi but remember how to manufacture things because that’s all they’ve been doing for probably centuries now. He concludes, that this must have been a huge a class system separating the worker class of the underground and the elite upper class but now the tables have turned and the elite have turned into food for the underground dwellers.



The book is filled with nihilism and remorse in a world of our own making yet of hardly any semblance to our own. This is a future, as the narrator says, we couldn’t even have imagined. All those wars, technology, literature, desperation, desire and yearning for advancement were just a colossal waste now. Utterly senseless in this passive new world. Everything ever created by man had vanished. Even man himself is reduced to feeble creatures with no significant thought process or beasts of the dark with no morality. The book questions how futile then the actions of man are in the long run while we continue behave in same vile manner giving no thought to the legacy we’ll leave. But time conquers all, as is the general opinion of the time traveller and hence it was always futile to worry about legacy in the first place. Over the forces of space and time, nature may sustain but human effort certainly dwindles away into oblivion.

All in all, the novella, is one of the greatest and sincerely one of the first attempts of the venture of human mind into time travel through science fiction prose. The story follows through the disorderly, distraught, anxious yet resourceful narrator into a wild adventure taking us to times and places which are a bleak but conceivable fancies of future.

Hence, if you haven’t already, give this short book a chance and discover the roots of science fiction and time travel which established such a niche, developing a genre in itself.
The novella gorgeously ends with emphasis on the fact that humans may have vanished from this planet but humanity lives on.

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.”