Book Review: The Time Machine

"The Time Machine"

                                   - H. G. Wells

About the Author

Herbert George “H.G” wells have been called the father of science fiction. His most notable science fiction words include the war of the worlds (1897), The time machine (1895), The invisible man (1897), and the island of Doctor Moreau (1896). He was born in Bromley in Kent, England. He comes from backward class family.

About the Book

Herbert George Wells starts the book THE TIME MACHINE by arguing that the ‘Time’ is itself a separate dimension. Through the protagonist of the book, Wells present a theory that the first three dimensions are occupied by the space and the time is the fourth dimension.

In the book, an unnamed narrator tells the story of a time traveller whom he met and who then takes over the narration to describe about an event that happened to him. The Time Machine is all about imagination. Both of the person who wrote it, and the person who reads it. Wells’ Time Traveller takes a reader 800,000 years beyond his own era where he discovers two bizarre races—the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks—who not only symbolize the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow as well.

 

Reviews

This book is an adventurous tale about a brave inventor who travels into the distant future. The main character (the time traveler) in the book is a scientist and inventor in England has been able to construct a machine that will allow him to travel back though time. He first tested his machine by travelling over 800,000 years into future and comes in to contact with 2 species: the Eloi & the Morlocks. The Eloi are androgynous and pint-sized group, who seems to do no work and Morlocks, scary ape like creatures who live underground & come out only at night. After trying to decipher the relationship between the two and briefly losing, then recovering his time machine from the Morlocks, the traveler then escapes into the distant future where he witnesses events on earth at the end of its life. As he travels further he sees the decay & degeneration of life on earth, he then decides to return to his own time & eventually finds himself back home.

The book is written in 1895 and the writing resembles the typical style of the writers at that time. Wells’ style, is all about of details and narration. The writer and the reader both are the spectator in this kind of writing. Actually, I feel, due this style the writer is putting an extra effort rather going by first person’s narrative. Another example is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. The reader and the narrator, Doctor John Watson, both are the viewers of the incidents described in the story. For most of the times, the reader will feel same what the narrator felt at the time of the incidents. This is one way of controlling a reader’s intellect.

I don’t believe there is a certain and a specific to read a book, well for most books, though after reading The Time Machine I do feel if only I had read it a few years back, I’d felt more eccentric by the concept proposed in the book than I feel now.