The Time Machine By H. G. Wells Read How You Want EasyRead 16-Point Large Print Edition ISBN: 978-1427070548 Genre: Science Fiction

Reviewed by Israel Drazin - February 7, 2011

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) published this science fiction tale in 1898. It draws on his sensible conviction that humanity and civilization will decline if people continue on their present suicidal course of seeking a life of leisure. "An animal," he writes, "perfectly in harmony with its environment is (nothing more than) a perfect mechanism." Intelligence and progress requires struggle and change. The gripping story can be seen as a parable.

A man develops a time machine that can transport him to the future, enters it, and flies forward some 800,000 years. He finds men and women who are no taller than four feet, very frail and soft, handsome, men and women look alike, but they are child-like and naïve, and they laugh a lot. They show little curiosity and are not intelligent. They treat him kindly as children would, and think he descended to them from the sun in a thunderstorm. They are vegetarians. Their buildings are dilapidated. They live a life of communism. They do not work or otherwise exert themselves. He finds, in short, a civilization in decline. They are called Eloi, and the reader wonders if this name is a mockery, an irony, for the well-known Semitic term El means "mighty," and was used in ancient societies to denote God.

There is, however, another civilization underground, a still smaller race, a people devoted to work, descendants of the earlier workers on earth, who work, even as workers do in our own time, away from society, in enclosed spaces. These are the Morlocks, and readers may wonder if Wells is associating their name with the similar name of a Babylonian idol. The Eloi people fear them, as present day upper class people are unable to understand and deal with workers. The Morlocks eat meat, the human flesh of the upper-level people who they capture at night, while they sleep. Despite the life and death threat from the Morlocks, the Eloi, the child-like insufficiently intelligent people, refuse to speak about them.

The time traveler undergoes many adventures, including relations with an Eloi girl, before he can escape and return to his own time. But, then, curious of what happens in the more distant future, he travels further in time, and discovers that humans have disappeared from earth, which is now inhabited by crabs.

• The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells
  With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin, the new guest at the Coach and Horses, is at first assumed to be a shy accident victim...
  
  
• The Door in the Wall and Other Stories, by H. G. Wells
  The story of a promising public figure used up by his job and obsessed by a vision of an enchanted garden he had known as a child.