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The Time Machine

H. G. Wells · 1895

  • About 2 hours
  • 17 chapters

H. G. Wells was thirty when this book made his name, taking an idea he'd been developing since his student days at the Normal School of Science and turning it into the founding work of modern time-travel fiction. Published in 1895, at the height of Victorian confidence in progress and empire, it uses a simple frame — an unnamed inventor recounts a journey far into humanity's future — to ask an unsettling question: what becomes of a species that stops having to struggle?

It's a short, spare book, more philosophical fable than adventure story, written in the crisp, curious voice of a scientist working through a thought experiment in front of us. Wells called his early novels "scientific romances," and this is the one that invented the form: a book that uses invention and speculation to unsettle its readers' certainties about their own age, rather than to reassure them about the future.

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Contents

  1. Opening pages
  2. 1I. Introduction
  3. 2II. The Machine
  4. 3III. The Time Traveller Returns
  5. 4IV. Time Travelling
  6. 5V. In the Golden Age
  7. 6VI. The Sunset of Mankind
  8. 7VII. A Sudden Shock
  9. 8VIII. Explanation
  10. 9IX. The Morlocks
  11. 10X. When Night Came
  12. 11XI. The Palace of Green Porcelain
  13. 12XII. In the Darkness
  14. 13XIII. The Trap of the White Sphinx
  15. 14XIV. The Further Vision
  16. 15XV. The Time Traveller’s Return
  17. 16XVI. After the Story
  18. 17Epilogue

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