![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895
Mar. 8th, 2013 06:28 pmThis is the Ur-time travel novel. It’s all there in the title, and the main character is actually called the Time Traveller.
I last read this when I was a teenager so this is a bit like being a time traveller myself. I had a vivid memory of the Eloi and Morlocks but had somehow interpolated some much happier scenes where he sees people working and striving rather than just living in a state of decline. I had cheered up his grim picture of the future which is that all of the world’s problems are solved, and this leads to inevitable decay. All knowledge is futile because it eventually ends up illegible, decayed and in the unvisited museum of the future.
Wells, of course, lived when science was just beginning to solve some of the age-old problems of humanity – diseases in crops and people, social conflict. He relishes the current fight but the long-term prognosis was not good.
Checking his biography on-line I see Wells was a Fabian, a eugenicist and a follower of the doctrine of free love. The Fabian aspects of his philosophy can certainly be seen in his description of the current living conditions of the East Enders of London (akin to those of the underground Morlocks). And there is more than a touch of class warfare in his portrayal of a future where the Eloi are harvested by the Morlocks for food. Eugenicist thought ties in with this conception of the descent of man was well. I see no signs of free love in the novel. (1) Indeed, the only woman is the child-like and affectionate Weena. I am pleased, though, that he consistently describes the Eloi as child-like and sickly where another Victorian might have used the words effeminate and womanly. It’s an important difference to me.
(1) In the absence of birth control, free love seems like a way better deal for men than women.
I last read this when I was a teenager so this is a bit like being a time traveller myself. I had a vivid memory of the Eloi and Morlocks but had somehow interpolated some much happier scenes where he sees people working and striving rather than just living in a state of decline. I had cheered up his grim picture of the future which is that all of the world’s problems are solved, and this leads to inevitable decay. All knowledge is futile because it eventually ends up illegible, decayed and in the unvisited museum of the future.
Wells, of course, lived when science was just beginning to solve some of the age-old problems of humanity – diseases in crops and people, social conflict. He relishes the current fight but the long-term prognosis was not good.
Checking his biography on-line I see Wells was a Fabian, a eugenicist and a follower of the doctrine of free love. The Fabian aspects of his philosophy can certainly be seen in his description of the current living conditions of the East Enders of London (akin to those of the underground Morlocks). And there is more than a touch of class warfare in his portrayal of a future where the Eloi are harvested by the Morlocks for food. Eugenicist thought ties in with this conception of the descent of man was well. I see no signs of free love in the novel. (1) Indeed, the only woman is the child-like and affectionate Weena. I am pleased, though, that he consistently describes the Eloi as child-like and sickly where another Victorian might have used the words effeminate and womanly. It’s an important difference to me.
(1) In the absence of birth control, free love seems like a way better deal for men than women.
