The Time Machine

About the book

A group of dinner guests listens as their host advances an extraordinary claim: time can be travelled through as deliberately as space. His account of a journey into the distant future begins with apparent wonder and soon becomes an exercise in uncertain interpretation. The people and environments he encounters resist the explanations he first assigns to them. Wells uses the traveller's changing theories to ask how social arrangements might shape the very conditions of human life. The frame of conversation keeps questions of evidence and credibility alive even as the imagined distances grow immense. This short novel joins adventure to speculation about work, comfort, adaptation, and decline. Its unsettling momentum comes from discoveries that make an attractive first impression increasingly difficult to sustain.

• Time and change
• Class divisions
• Progress and decline

Why read it

For a concise speculative adventure in which each explanation opens onto a more troubling possibility.

English text