The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
This is one of the great works of fiction in English, however we classify it. Science fiction, fantasy, steely realism, philosophical novel, adventure story. A definitive taste of things to come – the bar to which all other works of this kind would be hoped, and would fail, to meet.
It is satisfying beyond words to have all of this start at a weekly dinner and discussion – one given by the putative Time Traveller in the manner of dinners also given by Mr Wells – in which the Traveller first suggests the possibility of moving through time in an intentional, and not an inevitable, fashion.
And at that party, so many of his associates, Victorian gentlemen of gentility and accomplishment, they think it is all a trick. The modern world furnishes us with miracles, they say. But it does not permit us to do what you suggest.
Nor is there any reason to believe that the specimen time machine, a small item which is a scale model of the whole, has really gone anywhere – when you, the Time Traveller, instructed another to push the lever which supposedly sent it back (or forward!) in time.
A week passes and the group disperses, thinking up numerous and varied and self-satisfied reasons why the large Time Machine that the Time Traveller proposed to make use of could never work, would never work, will not work – whenever our friend the jokester finally gets around to claiming he has used it.
And then, after dinner itself begins, someone else presiding in the Time Traveller’s own unexplained absence, their friend reappears. He is injured; his face is bleeding. There are small but unhealed scars on his hands. And he is gaunt; he is footsore, as tramps are apt to be; and he is desperate for a glass or two of champagne and some of the meat that his guests are already so carelessly eating.
What follows is his story: a story of disappearing into the vast distances of time, of being thrown around, almost as one would be in a flying machine not invented in the late nineteenth century – a story that is so fantastical it is improbable.
A distant time – this a story about humanity grown into two peoples. One fair and simple and small and prey to terrible, unnamable Fear – fear of the dark, fear of the night. And the other a different race, a subterranean people, a people without mercy, without humanity – and yet still the eventual, far-flung spawn of us, the late-Victorian gentlemen sitting around this table, all the same.
As sociology, is this story first rate? Writers like Flecker (The Last Generation) and to an extent Chesterton (The Napoleon of Notting Hill) also wrote of an almost Hegelian ‘Last Man’ who would either pursue childlike pleasure, all society being sent to slow decay and the minds of men passively dribbling out of their ears, or would otherwise rend society into smaller and smaller enclaves, all of which die out through petty conflict or for lack of trying to survive.
Is it reasonable to believe, as Wells’s character does, that without challenge, without the grit in the oyster, humanity in the Overworld would become infantile and puny, incapable of effort, seeking each other in the darkness to ward off terrors they have not the language to describe? And that beneath them, in the under-places, a different race of mankind, stripped of all its virtue, made horrible and twisted and sick by maintaining the machines, would come out only when the sunlight did not burn their eyes to wreak almost tribal, clannish, cannibal revenge on the fair ones who live above?
Is this possible to see, to believe?
I don’t believe it matters all that much. So many of the moments in this story are permanent fixtures: once read, never dropped or dismissed.
The idea of the museum, filled with zoological and archaeological work, gone to ruin in the gathering darkness of a society where no one can read, no one wishes to learn. Libraries of publications turned to ash and dust and ribbons. The Morlocks’ (the underworld race) making examination of the author as he slept and in the darkness, touching him with their evil hands, beginning to bite him before he scared them off with unexpected fire or smashed their skulls with a makeshift metal crowbar.
And my personal favourite: when the Time Traveller goes yet further forward in time, towards the collapsing of the solar system and the eclipsing of light and life on earth; where he sees one immense crablike creature in the distance, feels what seems like a fly on his cheek, brings a hand up to push it away, only to realise very suddenly that what he felt was in fact an antenna belonging to another gigantic crab – one that is right next to him him. (A classic horror idea: something disturbing but far away suddenly revealed to be very close indeed.) I must confess to having shivered and shouted out loud upon reading.
And the horror of his journey and the difficulty of telling his story concluding not with the destruction of the machine (as is common in science fiction), but with the Time Traveller instructing the unnamed protagonist to wait an hour for him while he makes another journey in time. Just one more journey. And only for an hour. Only for an hour, in the late-Victorian present. Just one more hour in time.