Greatly Belated Book Reviews: The Time Machine

Hm, hm, hm. Usually, I review obscure books here. The Time Machine is one of the most famous, iconic, and important novels in the science fiction genre. What to say about it?

Well, first off, it's one of my least favorite of Wells' works. There, I said it.

Partly, this is probably because of my first impression, which was not particularly good. At about the same time I first read the book, I watched the 1960 film as part of the class which I read it for. (Er, if memory serves. It's a bit hazy back there.) The film was, well, kinda terrible, and it wasn't made any better by the idiot in class who made dirty jokes about the name of the Time Traveller's Eloi companion (Weena).

The fact that Wells actually had written an earlier story about time traveling (and further, it had a time machine in it-of course, time machines get their name from The Time Machine) is not terribly well-known.

Also, there is a passage which exists in one version of The Time Machine and not the "standard" version. (While TTM was released as a serial, the editor wanted to push the human degeneracy angle of the Morlock/Eloi time period; Wells didn't like being dictated to, and had it excised when the material was published as a novel. But of course, the passage still exists, and was even made into a short story of its own. One version of the book I read does indeed have the "grey man" passage in it.)

It is interesting that the subject of human degeneracy/evolution covered in the novel is one people still explore to one degree or another. Dougal Dixon, for instance, explores an ecosystem of numerous different kinds of humans who filled niches, and there's a short story whose name I don't recall where a quite extensive human ecosystem arises.

The primary legacy of The Time Machine, obviously, is that it elaborated on the idea that someone could be displaced in time through controllable means. (I would say it introduced the idea, but it obviously didn't. It really just popularized it.) But as a story, TTM is rather boring, and that's comparing it to Wells' other works. Still, it's his first real novel, so that's forgivable.

I'll get to some better ones, like The First Men in the Moon and The War of the Worlds, pretty soon here.

-Signing off.