Time Machine, The, is a classic science-fiction novel written by the English author H. G. Wells. The book was published in 1895 and was Wells’s first novel.
The Time Machine is told as a story within a story. The first narrator is an English scientist who gathers with a group of other men to listen to the nameless Time Traveler. This character tells of a machine he is building that will move through time. The Time Traveler returns to the next meeting a week later to tell the group of the journeys he had just undertaken.
The Time Traveler describes his trip to the year 802,701, where he finds the world divided into two classes. Living above ground are the beautiful but helpless Eloi. Living below ground are the brutal, apelike Morlocks. The Eloi depend on the Morlocks for food and clothing. The Morlocks eat the Eloi. The Time Traveler has a series of adventures in which he reassesses what these two classes of inhabitants might represent.
The Time Traveler returns to his time machine and moves further into the future. He reaches a time when giant crabs are the only living things on Earth. Finally, about 30 million years forward, he sees that the sun and Earth are dying. After finishing his account of his travels, the Time Traveler tells his hosts that he has only been gone a few minutes in real time and plans another voyage that would only last a brief time before his return. But at the novel’s end the Time Traveler seems to have disappeared.
The Time Machine strongly influenced later science fiction by introducing time travel as a major theme, along with warnings about the eventual dying out of the human race.
