Key themes
- Class and evolutionary divergence
- Progress and its discontents
- The indifference of deep time
About this book
A traveller journeys to the far future and finds humanity strangely divided; short and seminal.
Published in 1895, The Time Machine established Wells as the pioneer of scientific romance — the genre that would later be called science fiction.
Discussion questions
- Wells wrote in the 1890s, at the height of Victorian confidence in progress. The future he shows is not progress but collapse. What was Wells saying to his original audience?
- The Eloi and Morlocks are a direct extrapolation of the Victorian class divide. Does this allegory hold up, or does it feel too schematic?
- The Time Traveller goes further — to a dying earth under a bloated red sun. What does this extension of the journey add to the novel's argument?
- The Time Traveller is never named. What does this anonymity suggest about what Wells is interested in — individual character or something larger?
- At under a hundred pages, The Time Machine is one of the foundational texts of science fiction. What does it achieve that longer works sometimes cannot?
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