H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine is a post-apocalyptic science fiction story released in 1895. The work is often credited with popularizing the concept of time travel by employing a vehicle or equipment to travel forward or backward through time purposefully and selectively. Wells’ term “time machine” is now almost generally used to describe such a vehicle or gadget.
Wells’ book concentrates on a recount of the otherwise anonymous Time Traveller’s journey into the far future using a frame story set in then-present Victorian England. Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on Wells’ era’s increasing inequality and class divisions, which he projects as giving rise to two distinct human species: the fair, childlike Eloi and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes, respectively. The utopic romance novel News from Nowhere (1890) is thought to have inspired Wells’ picture of the Eloi as a people living in plenitude and abandon, while Wells’ cosmos in the novel is noticeably more cruel and terrible.
Wells noted in the book’s prologue in 1931 that The Time Machine appeared “a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks over it once more,” but that “the writer feels no sorrow for this adolescent attempt.” But critics have praised the way the novella deals with its themes. Marina Warner wrote that the novel was the most important step toward understanding fragments of desire before Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. She said that the novel “shows how close he felt to the melancholy seeker after a door that he once opened on to a luminous vision and could never find again.”
The Time Machine has been adapted into two feature films, two television versions, and numerous comic book adaptations. It has also been an indirect source of ideas for a number of other works of fiction in a wide range of media.