The Time Machine Summary

In the time of ‘The Time Machine’:

Everyone is familiar with the works of science fiction of Herbert George Wells. In literature he(and Jules Verne) is the father of the science fiction genre and a master storyteller in a way that was refreshing and innovating. His style of writing was groundbreaking and ahead of his time. It’s only 30 years later that the term science fiction was coined.. In this paper we will scrutinize one of his most popular stories: ‘The Time Machine’ and its manuscript or genesis. Important thereby is to understand the history of H.G. Wells and the influences that were important in that time and in his life. Wells was born on the 21st of September in 1866 in Bromby. This would be right around the start of ‘New Imperialism’.

The Time Machine is considered to be Wells’ finest work and is incidentally the one of the first novels, if not the first novel, to deal with the fantastical notion of time travel to such an extent. Since then time travel and ‘science fiction’ has become a beloved field amongst writers. The book was published in 1895 and it became an instant succes. Which is not strange when we look at the underlying subtext of ‘The Time Machine’. Though the main story is about time travelling, we can see that the story is not as unilateral as would seem on first sight. Wells has mixes the social and scientific interest of the Victorian time. He, like many of the nineteenth century sophists were influenced by the notion of evolution, was a great believer in Progress. ‘The modern mind, he said, sees the present life as but a preparation for the future and will unhesitatingly sacrifice the past to the future because it "sees the world as one great workshop, and the present is no more than material for the future, for the one thing that is yet destined to be" ("The Discovery of the Future," New York, 1914, p. 59)’ (Hausknecht p. 3)In ‘The Time Traveller’ Wells explores the possible issues of human progress, in other words: the decline of it. The novel reflects Wells’ own time where he warns the Victorians about the disastrous effects of capitalism and segregation of society into differential social classes whilst introducing them to the then new scientific and industrial ideas. He does this by removing the expected, fanciful utopian future or even a dystopian future. In the Time Traveller’s story there are no humans anymore. The only indication that we had ever lived are the weathered buildings on which plants have grown. The story is not actually told by the Time Traveller. The narrator of our story is the unidentified person who happens to be one of the Time Traveller’s guests. We perceive the story in the way that narrator allows us to