The Time Machine
(ENG.)

“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.”

The Time Machine is not primarily a novel about time travel, time travel paradoxes and so forth. It is chiefly a speculation on the far future of humanity and, closer to home, about class conflict and the evolution of the industrial civilisation.

Wells advanced his social and political ideas in this narrative of a nameless Time Traveller who is hurtled into the year 802,701 by his elaborate ivory, crystal, and brass contraption. The world he finds is peopled by two races: the decadent Eloi, fluttery and useless, are dependent for food, clothing, and shelter on the simian subterranean Morlocks, who prey on them. The two races – whose names are borrowed from the biblical Eli and Moloch – symbolize Wells’s vision of the eventual result of unchecked capitalism: a neurasthenic upper class that would eventually be devoured by a proletariat driven to the depths.