Wells' Time Machine

I just finished re-reading H.G. Wells' The Time Machine for my modernity class. I love that little book. Many of my students will tell you I have a thing for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stuff anyway. But my appreciation of Wells' work goes past that. Wells had a talent for packing a lot into such a small little novella.
In case you haven't read it before, here's a short summary. The Time Traveler (Wells gives very few names in this book, mainly titles) is having dinner with several guests and discusses the possibilities of time travel with them. He presents it as though it is simply a matter of fact that we can manipulate the time dimension as easily as we do the other three. No one agrees with him so he brings out his little model time machine and sends it into the future in front of their eyes. Some discussion on the physics of this take place and everyone leaves. Next week they return, with some new faces, and find that the Time Traveler is not around. They begin eating anyway (per instructions, lest we think them rude) and are interrupted by his appearance. He looks very ragged and one guest notices that he has no shoes on. After a few glasses of wine he disappears to get dressed and promises to return and tell them the story. When he returns he begins to tell them that he has been time traveling for eight days and that he left just that morning. He tells them of his initial trip to 802,701 AD and the people he found there. He initially meets some toga-wearing childlike people who have very few cares and even less attention to anything but eating and games. His initial observations lead him to the conclusion that humanity has at last developed a Utopian existence through evolution and the principles of communism. Through a series of adventures and discoveries he learns that this is the exact opposite of the situation. Rather, ages ago, the Eloi (the childlike people) banished the working class underground. There they evolved into the hideous Morlocks. At this stage of existence, the Eloi (who have become ignorant of how their own existence is maintained) are food for the underground Morlocks. These Morlocks also steal the Time Machine, which the Time Traveler has to get back. He eventually does and travels even further, nearly 30 million years, into the future. Here is where the really interesting part of the book takes place. Over a few short burst of time travel, he witnesses the end of the world. When he first arrives, the Earth has ceased to rotate and the Sun has grown larger and is a deep red. Few living things appear on the shore of this future beach (set where once London stood). But what is there is strikingly non-human. He describes huge crab-like creatures that plod along slowly and speaks of great vegetative life. At his final stop even the crab creatures have departed and nothing is left but a green lichen growing on the rocks and some odd soccer ball shaped creature with tentacles in the water. He returns home and the story comes full circle. At the very end, he has gone traveling again and been missing for three years with no word from him.
This story is great! I think it is great because Wells was an unashamed evolutionist and modernist. He accepted the theory of evolution as put forward by Darwin. He was also as consistent with this position as you could hope for. He argues in this little work that we are deluded if we believe the human race to be the final stage of evolution. Darwin, and his supporters, spoke of :Survival of the fittest." In The Time Machine, Wells essentially says that humanity is the least fit to finally survive to the end of history. Rather than intellectual creatures, we see crab-like monstrosities and green slime on rocks.
Wells also exposes several social issues as well. Several times people speak of an ideal communist society in the book. Wells argues that this is a fallacy and can never happen. When we first see the Eloi we get the impression that they have managed to create an ideal existence. Later we see this is only the case until we look under the surface (literally). Wells is telling us that no society can demonstrate pure communism because humanity is inherently greedy. The only way the Eloi could do it was to banish the Morlocks from their sight. The way the Morlocks maintain their system is to consume the Eloi.
There is much to discuss in this book. Dover has an excellent copy or get a better one. It is a quick read and full of these fun issues. It is a great way to teach an introduction to the ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.