The Time Machine

A dinner-party inventor argues that time is a fourth dimension, disappears in his machine, and returns starving with an account of the year 802,701, where humanity has split into the delicate Eloi above ground and something else below. Wells was twenty-nine and this was his first novel; he had trained as a science teacher and knew how to make an impossible premise sound like a lecture. The horror is not the Morlocks but the arithmetic — what comfort does to a species, given time enough.