H. G. Wells. The Time Machine. 1898. Gutenberg.org, 2018.

Like many others in the days of their youth, I had read a few of the well-known novels of H. G. Wells, namely The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. The last two stuck with me, and I could not help thinking of Dr. Moreau when I read Crichton’s Next.

Somehow, I missed The Time Machine. Though I had never read it, I knew something about it because of things I had heard or read about it. I know I had some friends who read it or who had seen the 1960 film, which I also missed.

So, yes, I knew there was a time machine and the main character traveled into the future where humanity had evolved into two races or species—the Eloi and the Morlocks. Somewhere I even had a vague recollection of the name of Weena, the Time Traveller’s Eloi girlfriend.

Like other narrations of the time period such as by Conrad’s Marlow or Doyle’s Watson, this is a frame story told to us by a person who tells us what the Time Traveller told him. We never know the Time Traveller’s name. I seem to recall a television show—possibly The Wild, Wild West or Sliders—where he was given the name Tempus, Latin for “time.”

The story appears indebted to two or three other famous travel or survival stories: Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Typee. Gulliver finds a kind of ideal society ruled by horses, the Houyhnhnms, and depraved and decadent humans called Yahoos who promote evil. Similarly, the Morlocks of the underworld are the depraved anthropoids in The Time Machine who love the darkness rather than the light. (See John 3:19.)

Like the Time Traveller, Robinson Crusoe also finds himself stranded on a new, strange world. Crusoe discovers that his island is occasionally used as a retreat by cannibals, not unlike the way the Morlocks raid the Eloi on dark nights. Both Crusoe and the Time Traveller think of ways to exterminate their frightening, flesh-eating enemies but then have second thoughts. In Crusoe’s case, his conscience moves him. For the Time Traveller, it was simply impractical.

The Eloi live in a kind of simple, paradisaical idleness, like the Tahitians of Melville’s Typee. They spend the days eating, playing, and making love. The Time Traveller never sees any of them working. He was not even sure where their clothes come from.

They inhabit large, run-down buildings that had been built in an earlier era. They are smaller and weaker than humans like him. He had discovered a future land where people were living “on a strictly communistic basis” (6). But it was more like the vision not of Marx but of Marcuse, of sensual idleness. There are, for example, no older Eloi. Like the Golden Age of classical mythology, fruit trees were abundant, and that is what they lived on. But as in certain popular dystopias today, what happens to old people?

The Time Traveller notes that because the Eloi did not work, because “there is less necessity…the specialization of the sexes with the reference to their children’s needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our time, and in the future age it was complete.” (32) Gender fluidity? Wells could see something coming with greater leisure time even in his day.

The Time Traveller notes that with a kind of idealized communism “there were no signs of struggle.” So the Eloi are remarkably passive.

Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness…This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, then come languor and decay. (35)

Even the socialist Wells acknowledges that Utopias cannot last.

There is quite a bit of adventure and conflict here. Also, like much science fiction since, there is speculation about the direction biological evolution will take the human race. The Time Traveller’s theory—and he admits it is speculation—resembles Lysenko’s. Biological evolution goes hand in hand with the socialist dialectic. In this case, class distinctions eventually evolve mankind into two species.

The Time Traveller has a wild adventure in the future land of the Eloi and Morlocks. He also has experiences even further into the future that may have been inspired by Byron’s “Darkness.” The Time Machine ultimately takes a fairly realistic view of human nature in spite of its popular Utopian thought. Perhaps we need to consider what it is suggesting today.

As Milton put it:

…ignoble ease, and powerful sloth,
Not peace. (Paradise Lost 2.227-228)

And again:

But what more oft in nations grown corrupt
And by their vices brought into servitude,
Then to love bondage more than liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty. (Samson Agonistes 268-271)