The Time Machine

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
William Heinemann - 1895
216 pages

The Time Traveller hosts a dinner party one night to tell his guests that he has made a miniature version of a time machine, but he is laughed off. A week later, he invites them back for another dinner party, where he says that he has been to the future and begins to recount his tales in the year 802,701 A.D., where mankind has shifted itself into two forms: pale, naïve creatures called the Eloi, and apelike, light-fearing beasts called the Morlocks, who feed on the Eloi.

I was forced to read this book. If I weren't, I would probably have read it sometime later in life, when I felt like I wasn't really living until I read such classics as this and Dracula (which I still have not read). If I had read it later in life, I probably would have been more disappointed with The Time Machine than I already am. I did not feel one bit of emotion for the Time Traveller during his journeys because the fact that he was recounting them to us means that he could not have been in too much peril, otherwise he would not be telling them to us. If it were happening in the moment, while he were getting attacked by Morlocks and more, then it would have been better. The startling lack of characterization did not help the story either. The Time Traveller seemed nothing more than any old scientist who has an extravagant idea that he feels he simply must do, otherwise he will be mocked forever. The book moved along quite slowly, to the point where I felt like I needed Sparknotes to find out what just happened. I feel sorry for the person who had to write Sparknotes for it, because they must have had to pick through for some sort of meaning.

Grade: D-