The Time Machine

"This is the novel that inaugurated time travel as a sub-genre. Wells picked up the up-to-date (in the 1890s) scientific speculation about time being a fourth dimension, and ran with it, imagining a machine that could take a man backwards and forwards through time. Wells’s time traveller – we are not given his name – goes from late Victorian times to the year 802,701, where he finds that humanity has by a process of divergent evolution degenerated into two species – the infantile, hedonist Eloi and the subterranean, monstrous Morlocks who prey upon them. It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it is smoothly and evocatively written, and it manages to open a chink in the reader’s mind that gives a dizzying, thrilling glimpse down the vertiginous perspectives of long time. My favourite moment comes near the end, after the time traveller has left the Eloi and Morlocks behind him (as it were) and travelled more than 30 million years into the far distant future. He finds himself on a desolate beach, seemingly lifeless but for green slime on the rocks, the sun grown to massive proportions, and witnesses an eclipse: “The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.” Time viewed from the perspective of the sublime. It still makes the hairs stir on the back of my neck. Wells is the first genius of science fiction, and the genre informs his choice of core metaphor. We see it in pretty much all his short fiction – in an ordinary, contemporary environment we come across a device, object or circumstance which opens vistas to strange new worlds. In the short story “ The Door in the Wall ”, the protagonist finds a mysterious green door that permits him to leave the grimy reality of 19th century London and enter “a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light with a faint, clear gladness in its air”. And there are many subsequent stories that employ the same device. In “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes”, a malfunctioning scientific experiment replaces the protagonist’s ordinary vision with vision of the exact opposite point of the globe. In “The Crystal Egg”, the object of the story’s title gives its possessor, a London junk-shop owner, unexpected visual access to a scene on Mars, with Martian house and flying Martians. That last story epitomises the way this sort of tale operates. Wells draws a clear distinction between the shabby, lower middle class existence of the shopkeeper who owns the crystal egg and the fantastic, exotic world opened up by the egg itself. This contrast is integral to the functioning of the story. As Wells said in 1934 in Experiment in Autobiography , with reference to The Time Machine , “I had realised that the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the setting”. In “The Crystal Egg” the egg is, in fact, science fiction itself . It is the thing that gives us fantastic, other-worldly visions. By setting a seedy junk shop against the exotic Martian palace, the story balances the genre of late-century “realist” fiction – of the sort that Wells also wrote but which is more strongly associated with writers such as [George] Gissing and [Arnold] Bennett – with the sparkling possibilities of SF itself. This is the key to The Time Machine . Instead of reading the tale as an allegorical coding of contemporary class circumstances, we can read it as deliberate mediation of the generic representation of those circumstances (realism) and the escape from such quotidian, everyday representation (the time machine itself, or science fiction). It is of course possible to say, as critics have done, that the time machine is a mechanism by which the author can represent, for instance, Darwinian time. The time machine is like a clock, a car, a weapon and all the various things that critics have read into the tale built around it. But the time machine is a literary device. The time machine is science fiction."

"At the end of The Time Machine , the Time Traveller escapes from the world of 802,701. He presses the lever forward, and describes himself as plunging ‘into futurity’. The description that follows is impressive. It is only about five or six pages long, but its sense of cosmic scope invents what some identify as the ‘sense of wonder’ that is a central aspect of the appeal of science fiction to many of its readers. There is a sense of the sublimity of geological time. This is a speeded-up scene of the heat-death of the universe, an entropic slowing of the sun as it moves through the sky. The Traveller stops about 30 million years ahead on a desolate beach where he gets menaced by the feelers of giant crabs that scrabble across this scene. It is an utterly desolate vision—a fantastic vision of entropic decline, a rigorously scientific view of the end of the world. It invents the idea of far future visions that science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, or Arthur C. Clarke or Stephen Baxter, have constantly tried to achieve. It is unusual for Wells to be straining for this kind of literary effect. After that, he wrote much more instrumentally. This is what his argument with Henry James was ultimately about. Wells claimed that he was not really a literary person, but a journalist. He called his fictions ‘abortions’. Yet that passage near the end of The Time Machine is an amazing kind of powerful literary writing and shows that he could write well. His scientific education is crucial to his imagination. He went to what was called The Normal School of Science, where the first dean was Thomas Huxley. Although he was not a particularly passionate or devoted Darwinian, Huxley was famously called ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’. As Darwin was a timid man who disliked public speaking and feared the effect of his theory of evolution, Huxley went into battle for him. Huxley also had a genius for understanding that institutions played an important role in perpetuating science, and so he did not just write books or teach classes, but also set up institutions that would instruct people how to teach science. Huxley also fought to get basic science into the national curriculum, fighting the resistance of religious leaders. So, Wells received his scientific training from important people. He eventually failed his geology exams, because he was having too much fun running a literary journal, but he was given a good training in anatomy and biology. Two of his teachers were crucial for his ideas in The Time Machine . Huxley himself wrote a pessimistic account of evolution in 1893, called The Ethics of Evolution . This was a controversial piece saying that human ethics were diverging from biological evolution. Humanity was supposedly at a point where civilisation was becoming something of a problem: it was becoming too refined, and was not going to be able to survive the brutal natural struggle of the ‘survival of the fittest’. You can see that directly influences The Time Machine . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other key biologist who worked at The Normal School of Science was Edwin Ray Lankester. He wrote a book called Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism in 1880. Darwin tried to comfort us by saying: don’t worry, I know that we are descended from monkeys, but we are progressing ever upwards towards perfection, in a long line of unbroken progress. It was an optimistic, encouraging message. But biological theorists after Darwin said that if you can go up the evolutionary scale, then you can also go down it: you could degenerate and decline, falling back into earlier, more primitive forms. Of course, that is also one of the futures revealed in The Time Machine . In the end, the book is a portrait of the decline of human civilisation, and in this it is thoroughly a book of Victorian biology. Well, both the races depicted in the book, the Morlocks and the Eloi, have degenerated. The Time Traveller is actually rather a hopeless anthropologist. He arrives in this future terrain, and misunderstands everything. But that is what makes it an interesting book, a continual act of discovery. It is not a didactic story; you discover the implications of the future along with the Time Traveller. He first encounters these feeble human descendants called the Eloi. They have the attention spans of five-year-olds, and lie around in effete indolence, in what is a clear satire of the communistic utopias of the time, such as that of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Then, underground, the Time Traveller eventually discovers that there is a whole other race called the Morlocks, who are always described in animalistic terms: lemurs, spiders, monkeys, and so on. He has an absolute revulsion for these figures, who are clearly the descendants of the working class. They remain able to operate machines, are vital and cunning, but are also repulsive creatures. What tended to happen in the political discussions of the 1890s is that people used the authority of science to try and underpin their ideological beliefs. People claimed that the working class were criminal and immoral—but not only that, they were biologically so. To make such a claim supported by the authority of science meant that this view could not be contested without also taking on Darwin and Huxley, of denying the most advanced biology. These political views, filtered through biology, are what Wells was investigating in his book, but he was also ironizing them to a certain extent. I think it is ultimately too reductive to explain The Time Machine by references to Wells’s biography, but it is tempting. There are two key moments in his childhood, which are very important. His family was lower-middle class, and his father became ill, and so they slipped down the social, rather than evolutionary, scale rather suddenly. This sort of trauma—the same thing happened to Dickens—can be very formative. At fourteen, Wells had to become an apprentice to a draper. He describes very evocatively the sense of living in a basement for hours on end, working as an apprentice, and just being able to see the feet of people walking down the road above him. Then, in order to try and support the family, his mother became the head of the servants at Uppark, a large aristocratic house, and so spent much of her time literally ‘below stairs’. So the idea of a class divide that is spatial—the working class below and the upper classes above—is very clear in these biographical ways. “He was part of a generation that was beginning to think about science as a resource for literature” But it’s not just a personal story. Lots of people were talking about this divide that was beginning to emerge in the 1890s, a literal subculture of the working classes. For instance, just before The Time Machine came out there was a huge anxiety about the coal miners who had gone on strike in 1893, and who had brought the country to a standstill. Many of the middle and upper classes thought that they were being held to ransom by these coal miners—these strange, dwarfish Welsh and northern miners—about whom they really knew nothing. There was a famous cartoon of a bourgeois family sitting comfortably in their parlour, while underneath the coalminers were working in tunnels and shafts under the foundations. And then there was also the commonly used metaphor of the unknown ‘underworlds’ of a city as vast as London, the terrains that no respectable person had ever seen. There was a lot of discussion about these underworlds in the 1890s, which also fed into The Time Machine . Definitely. In a way, what makes good science fiction is the ability to look at the gaps or the possibilities in science that have not quite been fixed down. Science fiction exploits these gaps: it is rarely accurate science; rather, it takes projects forward from possibilities, particularly in phases when science is going through rapid change. We probably will not be able to go faster than light, but nevertheless, it is a useful convention to have spaceships that go faster than light in science fiction stories. In the 1890s, there was a great deal of advance in detecting ‘invisible’ energy, radio waves, radiation, ‘dark matter’, new frequencies. In neurology there were major advances in understanding the physiology of the nervous system. It was an exciting time to be a young biologist like Wells. In The Time Machine , Wells is playing off two kinds of science. There is the biological aspect, of Darwinian and degenerationist theory. In fact, Wells was quite an ideologue about degeneration, along with many in his generation. They did believe that the race was declining and that positive interventions would be needed to be made. But while he believes in the biological scheme, he also draws on the physics of the period. The sun, according to Lord Kelvin—a very prominent and respected scientist of the time—only had 10,000 years left. (They didn’t understand nuclear fusion yet, so they thought that the sun must burn out). Wells uses this time-scale as well. His Traveller goes 30 million years into the future—which is a very Darwinian time scheme—but he describes heat-death, which is only 10,000 years ahead, at least according to Lord Kelvin. Wells plays these two kinds of science off against each other, using the gaps in knowledge to generate his fiction."