The Time Machine

At a dinner among doctors, editors, and sceptics, a scientist known only as the Time Traveller explains that time is the fourth dimension — and that he has built a machine to move through it. A week later he returns, exhausted and barely believed, to tell where he has been: the year 802,701, where mankind has divided into two species. Above ground are the Eloi, beautiful and idle; below are the Morlocks, pale machine-tenders who emerge in darkness to feed on the Eloi they appear to serve.

Wells, a socialist trained in biology, took the class divide of industrial England and extrapolated it into evolution itself — the leisured few become helpless livestock, the labouring many become predators driven underground. Past that ruined paradise the Traveller pushes on to a dying world thirty million years hence, where a vast red sun hangs over a silent beach and life itself is guttering out.

Told as a framed after-dinner tale and compressed into a single swift novella, The Time Machine coined the phrase, popularised time as a fourth dimension, and effectively invented the modern scientific romance — the ancestor of all science fiction. It made Wells’s name on publication in 1895 and has cast its shadow over the genre ever since.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition, meaning, and method, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.