BOOK
#75

The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells


Review by Edward Tanguay
November 24, 1997

Anybody living at the end of the 19th century who thought the world was going to change in 100 years was completely right. I like to read about the various views (Edward Bellemy for instance) that were held at the time.  This book gave me a twist however that I was not expecting: capitalists evolve into soft and silly smurfs who are hunted by laborists transformed into stupid subterrenean albino beasts.

It seems that nothing of the good remained in man. All deeper values had been lost. The Eloi were soft and pink and spineless, (". . . to adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more") and the Morlocks where stupid, hunch-backed savages. (Isn't being human exactly the practice of maintaining the middle road?) Wells suggests that the division of capitalist and labor deprives us of our humaness (". . . even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practiically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?")

You have to adore weena. The "romance" with her was nice and childlike. The lack of romance or potential romance with an Eloi supported the realization that this "species" had significantly drifted away from that of human beings ("but I only learned that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head").

The "world on its head" vision that he gives is fresh. It was surprising and horrifying to realize that "these Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the antlike Morlocks preserved and preyed upon--probably saw to the breeding of." The workers win in the end, in a sense, and then, everyone loses.  In fact, it isn't really a social critic, as no one can stop the millenia forces of evolution, but it is just a bleek, existential look into the future of man.

I enjoyed the 19th century British style, and the cool James-Bond-link smoothness of the narrator (". . . in a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters.")

I liked the scientific references in this book. I rarely light a match now without thinking "what a rare thing flame must be in the absence ofman and in a temperate climate." And the smack of scientific brain teasers made it fun:

Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?

There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along with it.

And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?

This is a tiny book and a must read.

Edward Tanguay


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