The Time Ships
Winner of the BSFA, Philip K.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Time Machine about?
An unnamed Victorian inventor demonstrates a machine for travelling through time, then returns a week later, bloodied and shaken, with a story. In the year 802,701 humanity has split into the childlike, surface-dwelling Eloi and the pale industrial Morlocks who feed on them — class division pursued to its evolutionary conclusion. Pressing further, the Traveller witnesses the death of the Earth itself under a swollen red sun, one of the bleakest and most beautiful passages in the genre. All this in barely a hundred pages.
Why it matters
Effectively invented time travel as a fictional device and the far-future vision as a literary mode. The 1960 George Pal film is the best-known of several adaptations.
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