The Time Machine

Summary

What if you could travel through time?

A man sits among friends in the comfortable warmth of a Victorian parlor. He is about to describe something impossible—a journey to the end of the world. But first, he must explain why time is not what they think it is.

“There is no difference,” he tells them, “between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”

His friends are skeptical. They laugh. They argue. They demand proof.

So he shows them.

This is The Time Machine.

The Traveller

H.G. Wells published this novella in 1895, and it launched an entirely new genre. There had been stories of fantastic voyages before—to the moon, to the center of the earth, to lost civilizations. But Wells was the first to send his hero into the future, and the future he imagined was unlike anything readers had seen.

The Time Traveller—we never learn his name—is a Victorian gentleman, an inventor, and a thinker. He has built a machine of ivory and brass and quartz crystal, a beautiful thing that sits in his laboratory like a promise. When he demonstrates a small model to his friends, it vanishes before their eyes—sent spinning into the future.

A week later, the Traveller appears at his own dinner party, haggard and filthy, his clothes torn, his eyes wild. He has been gone for eight days. He has traveled over eight hundred thousand years.

And he has a story to tell.

The Future

The Time Machine hurls him forward through the centuries. He watches the sun arc across the sky like a bouncing ball. He sees buildings rise and fall like waves. The seasons blur into a continuous greyness. And then, at last, he stops.

The year is 802,701 A.D.

The Traveller finds himself in what appears to be a paradise. The world is a garden. Great crumbling palaces dot the landscape, beautiful and decaying. The Thames has shifted from its course. And everywhere, among the flowers and fruit trees, live the Eloi.

They are humanity’s descendants—but they are nothing like humans. They are small, perhaps four feet tall, with delicate features and soft, childlike bodies. They eat only fruit. They wear flowing robes. They laugh and play and make garlands of flowers. They seem to have no work, no struggle, no fear.

The Traveller is delighted at first. This is what progress looks like, he thinks. Humanity has conquered nature. Disease has been eliminated. War has ended. The struggle for existence is over.

But paradise has a cost.

The Eloi

The Eloi are beautiful—and they are vacant. They have the intellectual capacity of five-year-old children. They tire easily. They cannot concentrate. They have no curiosity about the stranger who has appeared among them from another time.

The Traveller tries to learn their language, but it is almost entirely concrete nouns and simple verbs. They have forgotten abstraction. They have forgotten history. They do not know who built the great palaces in which they sleep, or why those palaces are falling into ruin.

The Traveller develops a theory. In a world without struggle, he reasons, there is no need for intelligence or strength. The qualities that make humanity great—our ambition, our creativity, our resilience—are products of hardship. Remove the hardship, and you remove the qualities.

The Eloi are what humans become when life is too easy.

But the Traveller is wrong. Or rather, he has only half the story.

The Morlocks

The Time Machine vanishes.

The Traveller searches frantically. He finds marks in the turf, strange footprints, evidence that his machine has been dragged into the hollow bronze pedestal beneath a great white sphinx. He pounds on the metal panels. He demands help from the Eloi. They refuse—or rather, they cannot help. The very mention of the sphinx fills them with a terror they cannot explain.

And then, at night, the Traveller sees them.

Pale shapes in the darkness. Large, greyish-red eyes that gleam like rubies. Soft, white bodies, stooping and strange. They emerge from circular wells scattered across the landscape—wells that, he now realizes, are ventilation shafts for a vast underground world.

These are the Morlocks.

The Truth

The Traveller descends into the darkness. What he finds there overturns everything he believed about the future.

The Morlocks live underground, in a world of machines and darkness. They are the workers—the descendants of the laboring classes, driven below ground over countless generations until they evolved into something no longer quite human. They tend the machinery. They produce the food that feeds the Eloi. They live in the dark because their ancestors lived in the dark.

And they eat flesh.

The Eloi are not their masters. The Eloi are their cattle.

The pretty creatures above ground, with their soft lives and empty minds, are being bred for slaughter. The Morlocks emerge at night, when the Eloi are helpless with fear, and they take what they need.

This is Wells’s terrible vision of the future. Not utopia, but a grotesque inversion of Victorian class society. The rich have become so pampered that they have devolved into helpless children. The poor have become so degraded that they have devolved into monsters. Neither side remembers how it began. Both are trapped in a system neither created.

Weena

Among the Eloi, the Traveller befriends a young woman named Weena. He saves her from drowning—a feat the other Eloi are too indifferent to attempt—and she becomes devoted to him. She is the closest thing to a genuine companion he finds in this alien future.

Weena is childlike and affectionate. She makes him garlands of flowers. She follows him everywhere. She is terrified of the dark, terrified of the Morlocks, terrified of being left alone.

The Traveller grows to love her, in a way—or at least to feel protective of her. In a world of indifference, her simple devotion touches him.

He decides he cannot leave her behind.

The Palace of Green Porcelain

Searching for tools and weapons, the Traveller and Weena journey to a ruined building he calls the Palace of Green Porcelain. It is, he realizes, a museum—or was, tens of thousands of years ago. The artifacts of human civilization lie scattered and decaying: machines whose purpose is forgotten, books crumbled to dust, skeletons of great beasts.

In the gallery of paleontology, he finds matches. In another section, he finds camphor, which burns easily. He breaks off a lever of iron to use as a weapon. He is preparing for war.

On the return journey, the Morlocks attack. The Traveller fights them off with fire—great blazing fires that illuminate the night and send the pale creatures screaming back into the darkness. But the forest catches. The flames spread. Weena is lost.

The Traveller never finds her body. He never knows if she escaped or burned or was taken by the Morlocks. He carries only two withered flowers she placed in his pocket, souvenirs of a friendship that lasted a week and ended in tragedy.

The Escape

The Traveller returns to the White Sphinx to find that the bronze panels have been opened. His machine waits inside—a trap, he realizes. The Morlocks want to capture him.

But they have made a mistake. They have removed the control levers from the machine, thinking to disable it. They do not know that the Traveller has been carrying those levers in his pocket all along.

He fights through the darkness, reattaches the levers, and throws himself into time once more.

The End of the World

But the Traveller does not stop in the year 802,701. He travels further—much further—to see what becomes of the Earth.

He watches the sun grow larger and redder as it ages. He sees the oceans drain away. He visits a beach thirty million years in the future, where the tide barely moves and a bloated red sun hangs motionless on the horizon. The only life he can see is a black, tentacled creature flopping in the shallows and lichens on the rocks.

He travels still further. The sun fills a quarter of the sky. Snow begins to fall. The air grows thin. The Earth is dying.

This is the true end—not with a bang but with a slow, cold entropy. The universe is winding down. All the struggle and striving of humanity, all the empires and inventions and dreams, will end in frozen silence.

The Traveller flees back to his own time.

The Return

He arrives at his house just in time for dinner, exhausted and shattered. He tells his story to his skeptical friends. Most of them do not believe him.

But the narrator—the person recording this account—is not so certain. He has seen the Time Machine. He has held the two withered flowers, species unknown to any botanist.

Three years later, the Time Traveller sets off again, taking with him a camera and a knapsack. He never returns.

What It Means

The Time Machine is barely a hundred pages long, but it contains multitudes. It is a scientific romance, an adventure story, and a political warning.

Wells was a socialist, and this novella is partly an attack on the class divisions of Victorian England. The separation between the Eloi and the Morlocks is the separation between rich and poor taken to its logical extreme. If you treat workers as subhuman for long enough, Wells suggests, they may actually become so—and they may take their revenge.

But the novella is also about entropy, about the inevitable running down of all things. The beautiful garden of the Eloi is already decaying when the Traveller arrives. The palaces are crumbling. The species is declining. And beyond that, the Earth itself is dying, the sun burning out, the universe growing cold.

Against this cosmic pessimism, the Traveller offers only fragile human values: curiosity, courage, the love of knowledge for its own sake. He goes into the future not for profit but simply to see. And even when what he sees terrifies him, he keeps looking.

The narrator ends with a question: what does the Traveller’s journey mean? Is there any hope for humanity?

“He, I know… thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind,” the narrator admits. But in his hand, he holds two strange flowers—evidence that even in a ruined future, beauty survived.

It will have to be enough.