PDF Summary:The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

A Victorian scientist builds a machine that can travel through time. In the distant future he finds that, rather than advancing, human civilization has totally collapsed. The Time Machine, first published in 1895, is one of the earliest known science fiction stories. This literary classic by English author H.G. Wells popularized the concept of time travel and introduced the now-common phrase “time machine.”

This guide will organize The Time Machine into four sections. It begins with the Time Traveller showing off the time machine he invented. He journeys into the future, where humanity has evolved into the childlike Eloi and the bestial Morlocks. He then goes even further into the future and sees the end of the world. Finally, he goes back home to tell his friends what he’s seen. Our commentary will discuss the science behind the story, including which concepts are real and which are fiction. It will also discuss the literary techniques and symbolism Wells used to craft this story.

(continued)...

Meeting the Morlocks

As the Time Traveller continues to explore, he notices numerous large holes, resembling wells, going deep into the ground. He finds that the wells are part of an enormous mechanical ventilation system that’s pulling air underground.

On his fourth day in the future, the Time Traveller takes shelter in one of the many ruins. Inside it, he encounters a strange, pale, ape-like creature, larger than an Eloi though still smaller than a human. The creature immediately runs away from him. He tries to follow, but it climbs down one of the wells and disappears.

Thinking about everything he has seen since arriving in 802701 A.D., the Time Traveller concludes that humans have evolved into two species: the surface-dwelling Eloi and this subterranean race, whom he learns are called Morlocks.

(Shortform note: Humans splitting into Eloi and Morlocks are an example of divergent evolution—in other words, a single species evolving over time into multiple different species. A real-world example of this is how dogs and wolves have a common ancestor, but are now totally different animals.)

The Time Traveller further hypothesizes that these two species are the end result of the division between the upper class and the working class—a division that’s present and widening even in his own time. He muses that the rich must have forced the poor to live underground but to keep working for them. In other words, the idyllic surface world could only exist because of the mass exploitation of the working class.

(Shortform note: At this point, the future Wells envisions goes from appearing utopian (a perfect society where everyone is happy) to being revealed as dystopian (an unjust society where many people are suffering). Widespread oppression and exploitation is a common theme in dystopian novels, which—as Wells does here—often portray it as the natural endpoint of capitalism, where the majority of people live and work in inhumane conditions to enrich a relatively small upper class.)

Descending Into the Morlocks’ World

The Time Traveller is now certain that the Morlocks, not the Eloi, hid his machine (remember that the Eloi were shocked at the idea of opening the pedestal). Therefore, he decides that getting back to his own time will require going down into the Morlocks’ world to learn more about them.

The Time Traveller tries to climb down one of the wells, but when he stops to rest, Morlocks swarm and try to grab him. He lights a match so he can see his attackers, and the light scares the Morlocks away.

The Time Traveller then follows the fleeing Morlocks to a huge chamber. Inside the chamber is a table with a large hunk of meat on it. He reasons that it must be Eloi meat, since he hasn’t seen any farm animals either on the surface or underground.

(Shortform note: Just as the readers are meant to instinctively feel protective toward the Eloi, we’re meant to instinctively fear and hate the Morlocks. This is because the Morlocks are the opposite of the Eloi: While the Eloi are childlike, peaceful, vegetarian, and afraid of the dark, the Morlocks are bestial, aggressive, carnivorous, and afraid of light. These details are setting us up so that Wells can subvert our expectations by revealing that the Eloi and the Morlocks have a symbiotic relationship—in other words, each species needs the other to survive.)

The Time Traveller now understands that, while the Eloi might be the descendants of a wealthy ruling class, they’re now essentially well-kept livestock. In other words, the Morlocks continue to make clothes for the Eloi and see to their needs, while also using them as a food source.

Using the rest of his matches to keep the Morlocks at bay, the Time Traveller narrowly escapes and climbs back to the surface.

Are the Morlocks Evil?

The Time Machine doesn’t have clear-cut heroes and villains. The Morlocks are certainly the antagonists, in the sense that they’re a threat to the main character (the Time Traveller), and they try to stop him from achieving his goals of freely traveling and observing the future. However, learning that they’re (possibly) the descendants of an oppressed working class turns the Morlocks into somewhat sympathetic characters.

Furthermore, while they are aggressive, it’s hard to argue that the Morlocks are truly evil. In The Lucifer Effect, psychologist Philip Zimbardo defines evil as intentionally harming innocent people—in other words, cruelty for its own sake—but that description doesn’t match what we see of the Morlocks for two reasons:

1. They hunt the Eloi for food, not for sport. It’s unclear whether the Morlocks have another food source besides the Eloi, or whether they’d be able to survive without eating Eloi meat. Also, Wells doesn’t describe the Morlocks as being especially cruel; for example, we don’t see them terrorizing the Eloi they hunt or torturing the Eloi before killing them.

2. They attack the Time Traveller in self-defense. When the Time Traveller encounters a Morlock on the surface it runs away from him. The Morlocks don’t start attacking him until he climbs down a vent and enters their territory.

With that said, there are also two reasons one could argue that the Morlocks are evil:

1. They steal the time machine. We never find out the Morlocks’ reasons for taking the time machine and hiding it. Therefore, it’s possible that they stole the machine specifically to trap the Time Traveller.

2. They keep pursuing the Time Traveller and Weena. While the Morlocks don’t attack until the Time Traveller enters their territory, they also keep chasing him and trying to kill him long after he leaves it. Again, we don’t know their reasons; it’s possible they’re scared and trying to eliminate a threat (remember that they were terrified of his matches), but it’s equally possible they simply enjoy hunting and killing.

Escaping From 802701 A.D.

The Time Traveller continues to explore and finds several useful items. Inside the ruins of a museum, he breaks a large metal lever off of an old machine to use as a weapon. Then, in a library filled with decayed books, he finds a box of matches and a jar of camphor (a chemical compound that burns quickly and brightly).

(Shortform note: The ruined museum and library are further signs of civilization’s decay—they’re places associated with culture and education, which the Eloi and Morlocks apparently have no interest in. Only the Time Traveller, who possesses human knowledge and ingenuity, is able to recognize and use the things inside them.)

At this point the Time Traveller decides to go back to the garden, hoping that he can use the lever to break open the pedestal and get his machine back. However, the Morlocks pursue him and Weena, eventually surrounding them and trapping them in the woods. The Time Traveller builds a fire to keep the Morlocks away, and he and Weena fall asleep.

The Morlocks attack during the night despite the fire. The Time Traveller kills several of them with the broken lever, and the rest run away. He then realizes that the fire he started has spread to the surrounding trees, and Weena has disappeared, so he runs alone out of the woods to safety.

Once the sun rises the Time Traveller searches for Weena again. However, he still can’t find her, and he concludes that she must have died in the fire. He’s briefly tempted to kill the Morlocks—who are helpless because of the light and heat from the forest fire—but decides against it.

When the Time Traveller makes it back to the garden he’d first arrived in, he’s surprised to see that the statue’s pedestal is already open. He knows it must be a Morlock trap, but he goes inside anyway since that’s the only way to get back to his time machine. The Morlocks attack as he expects, but he manages to fight through them, reattach the control levers for the time machine, and escape further into the future.

Did the Loss of Creativity Doom Society?

Creativity is a distinctly human trait that neither the Eloi nor the Morlocks display. In A First-Rate Madness, psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi defines creativity as the ability to identify problems that others haven’t noticed and to come up with innovative solutions for those problems. However, the Eloi and the Morlocks don’t seem to innovate at all—they just follow routines and become frightened or angry when something disrupts those routines.

One thing Wells never explicitly tells us is why civilization collapsed. The only explanation we get is the Time Traveller’s guess that the ruling class drove the working class underground, and over time they evolved into the Eloi and the Morlocks, respectively. However, that doesn’t really answer the question: Why couldn’t these new species keep society and culture from falling apart (or, alternatively, why didn’t they)? The loss of creativity would explain it.

If humanity somehow lost the ability to be creative—to identify new problems and devise solutions for them—all progress would stop. Without creativity, at best we could only keep society as it currently is. In fact, that’s exactly what the Morlocks do: They keep the ventilation system working and take care of the Eloi, but there are no signs of them trying to invent or discover new things.

Furthermore, if new problems arose without people recognizing or solving them, civilization would eventually decay and collapse just as Wells describes. For example, suppose the world’s supply of fossil fuels ran out. Without the ability to innovate new sources of energy and fuel, we’d suffer widespread power outages, and many of our machines (including cars) would stop working. The impact on society would be devastating and permanent.

The End of the World

In his escape from the Morlocks, the Time Traveller leaps many millennia into the future. Watching from inside his time machine, he sees that the sun is getting bigger and redder as he travels, and the Earth is turning more and more slowly.

(Shortform note: Our sun will eventually become a red giant—a dying star with no hydrogen left to fuel it—as Wells describes here. However, NASA estimates that will happen around six billion years from now, not 30 million years.)

He finally stops the machine at an unspecified time in the distant future. The Time Traveller finds himself in a world of lush plants and enormous animals but sees nothing humanoid.

(Shortform note: There’s a trend in how Wells envisions the future—as humans change into Eloi and Morlocks, then die out entirely, nature recovers and plants and animals thrive. In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman discusses how that recovery might happen and how long it would take. Weisman hypothesizes that, about 250,000 years after humans go extinct, the last remnants of our civilization (the plutonium in our nuclear weapons and reactors) will finally finish decaying, leaving Earth almost as though we’d never existed. In contrast with Wells, whose Time Traveller is horrified by a future in which humans are extinct, Weisman presents a hopeful future in which the Earth recovers from the damage humans have caused.)

After that stop, the Time Traveller continues into the future. He begins briefly stopping every thousand years to study his surroundings. There are fewer plants and animals each time he stops, and the Time Traveller concludes that the entire Earth is slowly dying.

Finally, about 30 million years into the future, he stops for a longer time to observe the state of the world more closely. The air in this time period is thin and extremely cold. The sun is now fully red and takes up a large section of the sky.

The Time Traveller sees nothing living except for some mosses and lichens, and a creature that looks like a black octopus roughly the size of a soccer ball flopping weakly in the ocean shallows. It begins to snow, then the sky turns dark and he realizes he’s seeing a solar eclipse.

The Time Traveller is horrified and sickened by this bleak view of the end of the world. Eventually the eclipse ends, and the returning light brings the Time Traveller to his senses. He returns to his machine and starts the journey back to his own time.

The End of the World as a Memento Mori

The end of the world (or, at least, the end of the world as we know it) is a subject that Wells wrote about more than once. For another example, his famous story The War of the Worlds is about how the world nearly ends when Martians invade.

Some scholars say that Wells wrote such stories as warnings, in order to shock his readers and scare them into supporting his vision of a unified, socialist world government. However, while that’s a good interpretation of 802701 A.D.—after civilization collapsed because of a divided, capitalist society—it doesn’t explain this vision of the end of the world. After all, when the whole world is dying, it won’t matter what kind of government or economy people used to have.

Instead, it’s possible that this section of The Time Machine is a different kind of warning, intended to make readers confront the idea of mortality. In other words, just like the Time Traveller, the readers have to grapple with the idea that everything on Earth (including themselves) will eventually die. While this is a terrifying idea for many people, some psychologists say that a healthy view of death can actually bring new meaning to your life. Remembering that your time is limited can inspire you to make the most of that time and to chase your dreams while you can.

Conclusion: Returning to the Present

The Time Traveller lands his machine on the same date he’d started from, at about eight o’clock in the evening. He hears the sounds of the dinner party happening just outside his laboratory, so he greets his guests, cleans himself up, and joins them.

The Time Traveller tells the dinner guests about his journey through time and adds that he doesn’t expect them to believe him. So, as evidence of his travels, he places two strange white flowers—a gift from Weena—on the table. He also points out that the time machine is stained with dirt and grass, which would be impossible had it never left his laboratory.

The guests eventually leave, deep in discussion about what he told them. The narrator can’t sleep that night, and the next day he returns to the Time Traveller’s house uninvited. He finds the Time Traveller getting ready for another journey through time. The Time Traveller says he’ll be back in half an hour, and this time he’ll bring conclusive proof that his story was true.

The story ends with the narrator explaining that three years have passed since that day. The Time Traveller never returned, and the narrator now thinks that he never will. He wonders whether the Time Traveller is still wandering through time or if he died during his travels.

(Shortform note: The 1960 movie adaptation of The Time Machine has a more conclusive and happier ending—the Time Traveller returns to the future to keep searching for Weena and to help the Eloi start a new culture for themselves.)

Furthermore, the narrator is still deeply upset by what he’d heard about the end of humanity and, later, the end of the world. His only comfort is the two flowers from Weena, which he kept for himself after the Time Traveller left on his second journey. To the narrator, the flowers symbolize the fact that people will always have the capacity for love and gratitude, even after they’ve lost everything else that makes them human.

The Narrator’s Existential Crisis

At the end of this story, the narrator is suffering from an existential crisis. In other words, he’s trying to come to terms with the knowledge that, ultimately, nothing he or anyone else does will matter. As the Time Traveller saw, eventually humans will go extinct and the world will end, and there will be no sign that we ever lived at all.

The purpose of life (or lack thereof) is the central issue of many different branches of philosophy. Existentialism teaches that life has no ultimate meaning or purpose, and therefore each of us must create our own. Instead of being told our purpose by an outside authority (such as parents, teachers, or religion), we’re all personally responsible for creating our own purpose and striving to fulfill it.

The narrator has taken the first step toward finding his own meaning in life, as existentialism says he must do: He’s concluded that kindness is at the core of humanity, and it’s the one thing that will remain after our strength and intelligence are gone. To move past his crisis, he needs to decide how that realization translates to a purpose in life. For example, he might conclude that his purpose should be to spread kindness and happiness however he can. If humanity is ultimately doomed, then perhaps the only reasonable purpose in life is to help people enjoy the time they have.