Wells touches gently on time travel as a notion, but mostly The Time Machine is about the terminal future he sees for mankind: His nameless time traveler ventures to the world that will be 802,701 A.D., And there he finds mankind divided among the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are a gentle, winsome, idle race, who do not labor; the Morlocks, in contrast, are a barbaric race - who use the Eloi for food. It's a grim vision, and a gripping one.
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Wells touches gently on time travel as a notion, but mostly The Time Machine is about the terminal future he sees for mankind: His nameless time traveler ventures to the world that will be 802,701 A.D., And there he finds mankind divided among the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are a gentle, winsome, idle race, who do not labor; the Morlocks, in contrast, are a barbaric race - who use the Eloi for food. It's a grim vision, and a gripping one.
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Brilliant, as a mature Uni student I have decided to buy all the books on my reading list. Wonderful information and an asset that hasn't cost the earth.
Melissa
Oct 3, 2015
Just not my cup of tea.
I just really couldn't get into this book. The idea of it is all great and super interesting (I mean, who doesn't find time travel interesting?) It's just the writing itself that got to me. H.G. Wells tends to somehow use a TON of words without actually saying anything which very quickly started making the book less and less appealing to me.
I'm not saying that there's no way anyone else could like this book. It's just the writing style that I don't like and that sort of thing differs with every individual. So others could easily like it even though I didn't.
I tried so hard to get into this book and I tried so hard to like it but I just couldn't. I'm going to try to read one of Wells' other books and see if it's just the writing style in "The Time Machine" I didn't like or if it's H.G. Wells' overall writing style in general.
readersreader
Jul 26, 2008
what would it really be like to travel to the futu
The Time Machine was written in 1895 when Wells was 29. The idea of time travel has always fascinated most everyone. Wells paints a terrible vision for the future--that there is no future. The Time Traveler (we never know his name) goes forward in time to the year 802,701 A.D. and finds a race of people, called Eloi, that do nothing but sit around and eat fruit. All the buildings are in the state of near collapse, and the Eloi seem to not care about anything. Then he finds that there is another race of people living underground, called Morlocks. They turn out to be cannibals, and are eating the Eloi as if they were cattle. In fact, it turns out that the Morlocks feed and clothe the Eloi. The Time Traveler continues to travel forward in time and sees that the earth has stopped spinning and is slowly moving towards the sun. According to Wells, that is our future. Facinating but scary and sad.
Ron Townsend
Jul 25, 2008
The beginning of science fiction
The Time Machine was the first book I read in Classics Illustrated as a boy and then read as a young adult in paperback. The idea of traveling in time has been with us over a century although we probably couldn't do it because we would also decrease or increase in age. The irony of the two races in 800000 AD is a thoughtful Darwinian concept and Wells suggests that there is no future for mankind if we continue to evolve. Traveling back in time would jeopardize history and traveling forward in time would give us the benefit of hindsight. This book is a classic of early science fiction and is brilliant in its concept.
