Review: The Time Machine, H. G. Wells

The Time Machine

by

H. G. Wells

Published 1895

Classics Club Review #6/50

IAN: I'd set the class a problem with A, B, and C as the three dimensions. . . . .

[Flashback]

SUSAN: It's impossible unless you use D and E!

IAN: D and E? Whatever for? Do the problem that's set, Susan.

SUSAN: I can't, Mr. Chesterton—you can't simply work on three of the dimensions.

IAN: Three of them? Oh, Time being the fourth, I suppose. Then what do you need E for? What do you make the fifth dimension?

SUSAN: Space. 

 

Doctor Who, "An Unearthly Child", 1963

Episode written by Anthony Coburn

("Spoilers!")

The opening scene of the novella, in which "the Time Traveller" gives us a lecture on the reality of physics, reminded me of Susan Foreman's frustrated near-breakdown in this first episode of Doctor Who—though I recognize that Susan and the Traveller are saying slightly different things. Also, the flickering and the rush of wind as the model machine takes off, and the stirring papers and dust when the functional one fades speedily into the Time Dimension, reminded me very much of the TARDIS.

After exhibiting a model Time Machine to his friends the Time Traveller requests that they assemble one evening at his home. They arrive and wait for him, as instructed, until dinner. And they wait. And they wait. They're about sit down to dinner when he comes in, travel-worn, battered, and having ruined his socks. He tells them he has travelled through Time. After changing and partaking in a good portion of mutton, he takes them into the room where this whole time-travel spiel first reared its nickel and quartz head. At his journey's end he begins it, seated opposite our frame narrator by the fire.

The machine taking off, with the gradual increase of speed/time, was very imaginative, and captivating to read:

    "I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind."  

 

PART III 

Here, a moment of appreciation for the marvelously named Mrs. Watchett. . . .

Cover of the first edition, featuring the White Sphinx of the story (because of course England's still crazy into Egyptology 800,806 years on)

He first lands in the year AD 802701, where he is met with the architectural triumphs of the age, now in a state of decay, and the wee, child-like inhabitants of this new Earth. All are alike in appearance and identical in style of dress, no matter man, woman, or child. They do not startle much at him, and eventually grow bored, another group of them coming over to him to expend the novelty of this new being. He amuses them easily by striking matches—dark when we think of what's to come. The Time Traveller ponders whether their society culmination of Communism. 

 

"[ . . . ] The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!

"[ . . . ] I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions."

PART IV

As regards "this too perfect triumph of man", the Time Traveller somewhat retracts his initial "Good on ya!" and ponders more than once upon the product of ultimate earthly bliss. However . . .

" [ . . . ] Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!"

PART IV

———

    "While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory way of the oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed the thread of my speculations."

PART IV

He discovers that air is sucked into these wells, and later finds towers like chimneys where air can be seen escaping. He deduces that it is part of some sort of ventilation system. There is something under the earth—and the Time Machine has been stolen!

" [ . . . ] I was led to make a further remark, which puzzled me still more; that aged and infirm among this people there were none."

PART V

Leaving that sinister observation where it is. . . .

He makes a friend of one of these future kind of humans, Weena, after he saves her from drowning in a gentle stream. She is very fond of him, and he grows consequently fond of her, taking comfort in some relationship and point of familiarity in this jejune Future. He joins her with the other almost-people in one of the great palaces where they all always sleep, but passes a disturbed night.

    "I had been restless, dreaming most disagreeably that I was drowned, and that sea-anemones were feeling over my face with their soft palps. I woke with a start, and with an odd fancy that some greyish animal had just rushed out of the chamber. I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable. It was that dim grey hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when everything is colourless and clear cut, and yet unreal."

PART V

Whilst exploring some ruined buildings he comes upon something like a cross between Gurgi from The Chronicles of Prydain and Gollum. It shuns the sunlight and flees down one of the air-wells as soon as possible. He assumes at first that it is an animal, but the strange truth gradually dawns upon him.

" [ . . . ] this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages."

The creature from the pit is human, too. Humanity has changed and divided. These two "races" are both human. The Time Traveller's vision of a Communist idyll is broken by this. This is no Utopia. He theorizes now that there is simply a further division of "the Capitalist and the Labourer". The new creatures are the descendants of the working-class, the above-ground people the remnants of the posh. The primitively formed beings live and work underground to maintain industry and provide comforts for the soft, ethereal aristocracy.

"Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?"

These UnderGrounders are known as the Morlocks, the others, the Eloi (which I pronounced in my head as "Eh-LOH-ee" but might be the "Ee-loy" or "Eh-loy" —?). Now the relationship is flipped: the strong still have power over the weak, but, thanks to Comfort the mind robber, the Eloi are now weak in both mind and body, the Morlocks strong.

There is a creepy scene where he goes to visit these beings, 'so like human spiders', and they are curious about him, coming up to touch and pull at him, put off at first by harsh shouts but eventually only deterred by light, to which their cave-accustomed eyes are sensitive. He gets as good a glance as he can at the cavern, and the large hunk of meat set out for a feast, before becoming too disturbed by the Morlocks, the close air, and the scent of blood to stay any longer. He makes a frantic escape from them, striking matches as they pursue and grab at him—running out of matches before the end (Larry Nightingale in the cellar full of Weeping Angels, anyone?).

"And so these inhuman sons of men—!"

PART VII

Despite karma, despite all the justifications for the Morlocks' behavior he attempts to make, the hand of fear has a firm hold on the Time Traveller. He is frightened of what they could do and do, feeling pity for the Eloi as the source of the Morlocks' dinner becomes clear, and resolving to take Weena with him to the 19th Century whenever he manages to retrieve his Time Machine, which he now understands to have been secreted into the White Sphinx that stands just opposite his landing site.

A very slick and science-y Penguin

He decides that he must find some secure place to sleep at night, a stronghold. His explorations bring Weena and him to a jade, palace-like building. It reveals itself to be a museum, structured almost like an art deco/nouveau (I'm not even sure) Crystal Palace. There are marvelous chandeliers, impressive glass cases for extraordinarily preserved fossils, massive books the leather bindings of which have decayed somewhat, and much else.

There is something so 19th-Century-Idea-of-Futuristic-Things about the museum, and I can't quite even put my finger on what. Our popular visions of the future now are very cold and ugly; grey metal, plastics, artificial light that is self-regulating and hidden from the eye, lasers and little micro-chips, and nutrition pills, and translucent screens that appear in the thin air and then disappear again with a wave of the hand—things like that—not cushions and glass and crystal and quartz and color and books and fruit and . . . sphinxes. It's just interesting how popular desire and idealism change, and how colored by a given present any vision of a future is.

The Traveller writes his name "upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took [his] fancy" ('—— wuz here'), notes a quantity of sulphur in a corner, and gets hold of a gun. The gun doesn't fire, being a museum piece, but it still works as a club if need be. Taking it he and Weena leave the museum to try and get back to the Hall, twilight coming close and Morlocks having the run of the place soon. They get into a wood, and, to put it one way, Smokey Bear would not be impressed.

Long story short, he sets everything on fire, Weena faints from fear/smoke inhalation, fortunately as either the flames or the Morlocks take her, and the whole wood becomes an Inferno. Morlocks—"damned souls"—running into a forest of the dead, trees and flame and smoke, the sky stained with fire; fire prostrating with its very light half of what it could make the last of the Time Traveller's species. He looks up at the poison sky, the hillside covered with the Morlocks running and shaking in fearful incomprehension, on all sides surrounded by his kind and yet the last human among them. They plunge into the fire, it swallows them in the darkness beyond, and he can only go, fighting off the unfortunate dæmons as they hurtle into him, blinded by hot light. Hell—Evil—Death in Heaven, if you look at the upperworld of the Eloi and the underworld of the Morlocks one way; Heaven Hell bent if you think of what the Eloi might have been, had they thought before of Consequences.

    "I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed."

PART X

Though I came for the Victorian sci-fi, I did find the Traveller's/Wells' inner philosophical debates interesting. The Time Traveller first interprets what he sees as Man striving for and achieving—inventing—perfection. But it is an imperfect perfection. Humankind loses its humanity and eventually everything crashes and burns. To get my thoughts out in the basic terms they were created in, political philosophies are designed and by their adherents considered to be the best way to the creation of, if you will, Heaven on Earth. This, to any worldview, sounds lovely (except Existentialism and Nihilism, I suppose, but that is quite meaningless). My personal ruminations on this subject, from a Christian perspective, land upon the paraphrase "be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect", which would to seem to track. However, the matter that Heaven cannot be present where is also the touch and temptation of evil, which in the mortal world is unavoidable what with Satan and all that, is, to put it in a way that amuses me, the kicker.—The kicker to the whole world being perfect in every fashion; but it is personally in the ways of charity and righteousness that Man is encouraged to grow. There lies the path to the heaven which is, in terms à la our strange friend St. John Rivers ('cause I've been thinking about reading Jane Eyre again), the reward of life on earth. Not every one will strive for these things, and of those that do the majority will not ultimately succeed in this life; that is a part of the human condition, it is a part of free will. But we all of us have an ideal, based on some unconscious knowledge of Heaven, and in Heaven that ideal achieves realization. As for Earth, we cannot reform or rout out every sinful person or deed because we cannot reform or rout out every sin. But still, as I say, is there the incitement, and that filters through to men and women and pushes them to try for Some Heaven—on Earth, with God—the exact inclination is theirs. In a secular society that push towards an idyll is half-identified and the dissected meaning is interpreted as the chance for Earth's absolute perfection and absolute peace for mankind, things which can only harm a world and species inherently flawed. The foundations must be solid; stone, not sand or marsh.

Such, my rambling tuppence. As the Time Traveller/Wells slid the door open to this train of thought, I decided to pursue it and, following the example of our hero, relate to what parts I ventured. I'm embarrassingly incoherent, but this review should have been posted in April or June and I am quite fed up with it staring at me with the little orange "Draft" tag.

We don't know if the Eloi plunged into the abyss of flame and thus humanity perished; it may well have burnt itself out, much as they did themselves.

The Time Traveller makes for the White Sphinx inside which he's sure he'll find his Time Machine. He is right, but also finds a nasty surprise of our doe-eyed, ape-like friends, who do not desire his departure. At this point of extremis, he flees wildly from the Morlocks, reeling through Time to millions of years in the future, with strange, vivid descriptions of the changing Earth.

    "The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and a whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. 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. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black."

PART XI

His return to the 19th Century is not exactly like a school reunion. At least, not a typical one. Haggard, bruised, bleeding, and blistered, he demands meat and his companions' silence on the subject of Time Travel. Once he's washed and everything, they settle back down into the parlour, and then he tells his tale (this bit happened earlier, and when the story's finished we return to our frame scene). The description of his friends' reactions is both somber and hilarious:

    He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tap with it nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary stillness. Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet. I took my eyes off the Time Traveller's face, and looked round at his audience. They were in the dark, and little spots of colour swam before them. The Medical Man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host. The Editor was looking hard at the end of his cigar—the sixth. The Journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I remember, were motionless.

    The Editor stood up with a sigh. "What a pity it is you're not a writer of stories!" he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller's shoulder.

    "You don't believe it?"

    "Well—"

    "I thought not."

PART XII

Flowers alien to 19th Century modern science are noted on a table, where the Traveller put them earlier in the evening.

    The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. "They were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time." He stared round the room. "I'm damned if it isn't all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of everyday is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times—but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's madness. And where did the dream come from? . . . I must look at that machine. If there is one!"

PART XII

The narrator of the narration, which we could take to be Wells or simply Mr. Somebody from Little Something, Somewhereshire, returns to the Time Traveller's house a while later, only to watch him disappear again into the Time Dimension. Three years later, he hasn't seen him since. He was equipped this time, with a Kodak and everything.

Our author wonders whether he might have gone backwards in Time, and been done to death by Stone Age peoples. Or he could have gone on to Doomsday, and stood on the edge of destruction—perhaps falling off. He might have returned to the future of the giant crabs and the dark, tentacled mass moving along the beach, a haunting landscape which he only glimpsed. Did he succumb to the cold of that desolation? Or did he go back to 802701 and try to mess with that sulphur? Everything might well have gone kerblam! after the beating the Machine took over the billions of years. Time is the ultimate foe; who knows, eh? Who knows.

The fantastic volume I got from the library, which includes the two other of his novels I've read. The Invisible Man is an insane & excellent anecdote of  insanity and intellectual excellence driven by Revenge Upon Humanity (a deadly chauffeur) and fueled by gallons of Amorality and just plain badness—it's a treat and a half!
The War of the Worlds is a cool but odd one I'll have to read again some day.

Well, I don't want to go, but I've been typing here for a while now, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. . . . 

6TH DOCTOR: Does nothing please you?

PERI: Yes! Purposeful travel, not aimless wanderings.

Doctor Who, "Timelash: Part One", 1985

Episode written by Glen McCoy

— Though containing a whiff of Frankenstein (1818/31) towards the end, Timelash makes explicit and conspicuous hommage to Wells and his stories, particularly The Time Machine, so I thought I'd give a quote from it that the Traveller might appreciate, what with his first foray into Time being lamentably ill thought out.

 

 

DON'T BLINK!