In his first published work of fiction, the British writer and futurist Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) shot to literary fame, marking the beginning of a career that would rival his celebrated French predecessor, author Jules Verne. Their popular works would practically corner the market on sci-fi film adaptations in the 20th century. Wells’ The Time Machine has proven especially enduring over the years, not only as a plot source but as a cautionary tale foretelling humanity’s dystopian future. Will Wells’ alarming prophecies prove to be not simply fiction?
Wells’ Time Machine, Darwin, and Marx
Studying primarily zoology at university, the London-born Wells briefly taught biology until he graduated into journalism first, then to writing novels. He was caught up in the revolutionary scientific ideas of his age, especially Darwin’s theory of evolution. But he was also influenced by the roiling social discourses of Karl Marx and his notion of the dialectical conflict between the rich propertied class (the bourgeois) and the poor and dispossessed class (the proletariat) forced to labor for them. Both Darwin and Marx are metaphorically engineered into the plot of The Time Machine, as they are in other of the author’s works, notably The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).
The Time Traveller
The Time Machine is a short, deceptively simple novel that begins, conspicuously, in media res: That is, from the Latin for “in the middle of things.” Its first sentence reads, “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.” There is no story exposition to speak of, no indication of who this “Time Traveller” is (he is never named), only that he is explaining his unorthodox theories of time and why he thinks it would be feasible to venture back and forth through it. Specifically, he proposes such a journey on a one-passenger, obscurely powered, brass-and-crystal sleigh contraption (think “steampunk”) of his own creation.
Further complicating the narrative is the fact that someone else (also not named, though hinted at) is relating the Time Traveller’s story in the past tense, thus functioning as the novel’s narrator. The reader learns that this person has been a regular guest at the Time Traveller’s house for weekly dinners, typically on Thursdays, along with several other men, a changeable roster that includes Filby, the Psychologist, and the Medical Man (i.e., doctor). Perhaps not surprisingly, the guests seem to think the Time Traveller’s ideas are absurd, or “humbug.”
A week later there is another dinner at the Time Traveller’s stately home, south of London. While the guests arrive on time, the host does not. No sooner than the meal is served, a pale, haggard, disheveled Time Traveler bursts into the drawing room. After champagne, a hearty meal of mutton, and a change of clothes, he proceeds to tell his guests about the eight eventful days he spent in the future—nearly all in the year 802,701. As he demands to tell his harrowing tale “uninterrupted,” the narrator pulls back and exclusively quotes his host’s account. While it remains to be seen whether his guests will believe his incredible tale, they are at least willing to listen.
Eloi and Morlocks
With that, Wells shifts his fantastical imagination in gear, reeling off his futuristic allegory of the Eloi and the Morlocks, the two wildly divergent humanoid races that succeeded Homo sapiens in the evolutionary march nearly a million years from now. Much to the Time Traveller’s chagrin, many of his first impressions and presumptions of the future turn out to be wrong, perhaps conditioned by the 19th-century utopian optimism inherent in Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” or the rose-colored visions conjured up in popular books such as Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward.
When the Time Traveller spies the slight, delicate, hedonistic race called the Eloi, he presumes that humanity has finally achieved ultimate prosperity and mastery over nature, one without want, hard labor, or conflict. And while the basic needs of the Eloi appear met—food and shelter most of all—he also pitiably discovers that they have lost the human will for creativity, art and invention. On second glance, they seemed to be a coddled race, almost infantile, however lovely. But who’s doing the coddling?
Little by little, the Traveller discovers the dark, nocturnal downside to utopia. His first inkling comes when he discovers an array of deep, round, waterless wells spread throughout the Eloi lands. Are they air shafts of some sort? Up close, they reverberate with the sounds of underground machinery operating non-stop. Finally, hidden in the shadows, he sees the hideous visages of the Morlocks. Not the fair, frail, sunny Eloi, but near-blind, albino, and ape-like, this is a devolved humanoid race that inhabits a hellish factory underworld. So the Time Traveler assumes the Eloi are the masters and relegates the lowly worker-Morlocks to a subterranean prison where they toil day and all night.
Devolution?
Wrong again, Sherlock. While the Eloi may have been the Morlocks’ overlords centuries before (as in the bourgeois ruling the proletariat) since then they have taken a Darwinian u-turn into decadence and lassitude, a regression that also has been physical. Living on a diet of fruits, vegetables, and frolic, they’re the post-human “98-pound weaklings” who would get sand kicked in their faces at the beach. Moreover, not only have the Morlocks bulked up over time, they’ve ghoulishly descended into man-eating freaks. The Time Traveller reasons that, in exchange for their labors, the Morlocks surface to take and carry out their pound of flesh—and then some—from the Eloi. You might call it transactional post-capitalism in the 8,000th century.
Now though this is most distressing to the Time Traveller as a 19th-century Victorian humanist, his most immediate concern is that his precious Time Machine has vanished. On return from one of his explorations, he’s horrified to discover his ride has been somehow removed. Once parked outside an immense marble statue of a reclining Egyptian-styled sphinx, now he suspects it’s been dragged inside the statue’s bronze pedestal. But by whom? Almost certainly the Morlocks.
Weena
Now he sets out to the colossal, faraway “Palace of the Green Porcelain” for answers and perhaps weapons, or at least tools. But at least he’s no longer alone. When he first arrives in the land of the Eloi, he saves a young woman from drowning while the other Eloi look on with unfeeling disinterest. After learning bits of her language, he finds out her name is Weena. Here Wells avoids the clichés of the romantic subplot (unlike the 1960 movie version) by depicting Weena as a small, elfin, child-like creature that the Time Traveller can carry with one arm. Nevertheless, it is Weena who poignantly takes to tucking flowers in his pockets, a very human token of affection and kindness that will take on a bigger meaning upon his return to his own present.
Abandoned and in ruins, the colossal structure he and Weena visit must have once been a mega-museum housing exhibits of all kinds, from the natural to the mechanical and cultural. Now it was just a dusty, decaying reminder of the dream of human accomplishment and progress. It’s here that Wells lays bare and exhibits his ominous warnings on the fate of mankind. Reflecting on the transformation of Homo sapiens against the advancing millennia, his intrepid Time Traveller says, “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”
Yet there is a flicker of hope and optimism behind such bleak pronouncements, especially when considering what the Time Traveller does find in working order at the museum. This, perhaps the most elemental and practical of human resources over the ages, is fire. In an old box of matches untouched by centuries of neglect, he finds a weapon of sorts to use against the Morlocks in his mission to recover his Time Machine.
Future Shock
While the whole of Wells’ work is imaginative, thoughtful, and deftly written, it is in Chapter XVI that he reaches the summit of science-fiction profundity. When the Time Traveller finally locates his machine, he’s almost immediately attacked by the Morlocks who surround him. His only escape is an escape into time. But not the past, not yet, but an unknown “futurity.” He pushes the levers of the controls as far as they will go, so fast that the spinning dials indicating years and centuries fly by in milliseconds. He stops at the limits of life itself, “drawn by the mystery of the earth’s fate.”
What does he find? He lands on a still, stark, post-historic beach. The sky is no longer blue but inky black. The moon is gone, while the sun is ballooning into a red giant, signaling its pending end. No living things in sight and only the sounds of the swell of the sea, “An abominable desolation hung over the world,” he says. And yet, suddenly, the red rock in front of him reveals itself to be a monstrous alien crab, followed by several others, all menacing him with tentacles. To escape, he speeds even further into the planet’s distant fate. Here too is silence, darkness, desolation. “All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”
Had humanity and its Earth finally run out of time? In his fictive predictions, Wells turned both Marx and Darwin upside down. Instead of an ever-rising class dialectic spiraling into a worker paradise, he writes of a stagnant and perverse social system in which the elites’ oppressive rule has not only backfired but has hatched a cannibalistic Frankenstein monster out of the exploited masses. Likewise, Darwin’s evolutionary “survival of the fittest” went so far in one direction it had nowhere to go but backward. Compounding that gloom is perhaps Wells’ integration of the physical theories of the Scottish Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), who postulated that entropy (negative energy) will eventually doom the universe to self-destruction.
Return Trip
But Wells doesn’t send his Time Traveller to his doom. From the infinite future, the hero has the presence of mind to zip back to his London home, if a bit late for dinner with his guests. Naturally, they don’t believe his wild, time-tripping story; one even calls it a “gaudy lie.” On the other hand, what should they make of the two strange white flowers he digs out of his pocket? The doctor confesses he can’t place their botanical classification.
With the narrative now back in the hands of the anonymous narrator, he tries one last time to see the Time Traveller, dropping by his laboratory the next day. The guest arrives, opens the door, and for a split second thinks he sees a “ghostly, indistinct figure sitting on a whirling mass of black and brass.” Was that him? Where did he go? Back to the future? The narrator is only left with those two white flowers, an eternal symbol of the tenderness and gratitude still possible in humanity, now, then or in the faraway, fantastic future.
