H G Wells

The Time Machine H G Wells

The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. The work popularized the concept of time travel by using a machine that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backward in time. This work is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre. The portion of the novella that sees the Time Traveller in a distant future where the sun is huge and red also places The Time Machine within the realm of eschatology, i.e. the study of the end times, the end of the world, and the ultimate destiny of humankind. The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, in Victorian England, and identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller. The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension and his demonstration of a tabletop model machine for traveling through it. He reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time and returns at dinner the following week to recount a remarkable tale, becoming the new narrator. In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device with a journey that takes him to A. D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults, and the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night.