The Time Machine

The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by the English writer H. G. Wells, published in 1895. It is one of the earliest stories to use a machine to travel through time deliberately, and it is told by a narrator who reports the account of an inventor known only as the Time Traveller. It has been adapted for film, radio and television several times.

At a dinner in London the Time Traveller argues that time is simply a fourth direction a body can move along, and he demonstrates a small scale model of a machine that disappears when it is set going. He then turns up at a later dinner looking wrecked and tells the guests where he has been. He has ridden the machine forward past his own century.

He arrives in a warm, overgrown world of small, gentle people, the Eloi, who live in apparent ease, and he can see that something is missing from their society well before he discovers what lives underneath it. He finds the Morlocks, who dwell below ground and feed on the Eloi, which is the division into two species that the story turns on. His journey then goes much further, to the last days of the planet, where something is still moving.

Wells wrote the novella as a meditation on class and on evolution as much as an adventure, and the two species are drawn as the descendants of the labouring and leisured classes. It is a standalone story, and the Time Traveller sets off again at the end.