The concept of travel through time was not
original to H. G. WELLS. Charles Dickens moved
Scrooge into his own past and future in The Christmas Carol (1843), and other writers had used similar magical or mystical means to accomplish the
same thing. Wells, however, wrote the first significant tale in which travel to another age was
achieved through scientific endeavor, in this case
the creation of a machine that somehow allowed
its operator to step outside the normal flow of time
and move forward or backward at will. The idea
for the story germinated in a series of essays Wells
had written some years earlier under the title The
Chronic Argonauts. The ensuing work of fiction—
actually a novella rather than a novel—also reflected Wells’s preoccupation with socialist
political philosophy and his conviction that class
struggle was inevitable.
The time traveler, whose name we never
learn, expects to find himself in a utopian future
where socialism has transformed the world. Instead, he emerges from his travels in what appears
to be a combination of park and wilderness. The
first humans he encounters are the Eloi, who are
friendly and lack guile or anger, at first suggesting
that he was correct in his assumptions. Later he
discovers that there are two strains of humanity.
The second, the Morlocks—descended from a
capitalist aristocracy—are deformed and live underground, but still dominate the world, breeding
the Eloi for food. Unlike the two film versions
(1960, 2002), which both take various liberties
with Wells’s story, the book does not have a
happy ending with the Morlocks destroyed and
the Eloi liberated.
In addition to the two film versions of Wells’s
original novel, there have been several sequels,
penned by other authors. The best of these is The
Time Ships (1995) by Stephen BAXTER. The anonymous traveler is off again, but this time he discovers that his earlier travels have altered the course
of human history. The Morlocks still emerged, but
they are comparatively benevolent and have developed a remarkable technology that allowed them
to encase the sun in a sphere and to abandon the
Earth for life in space. With a Morlock companion,
the traveler returns to explore alternate timelines.
Egon Friedell’s The Return of the Time Machine
(published in German in 1946 and translated into
English in 1972) suggests further but less interesting adventures as the time traveler investigates
other eras. Time Machine II (1981) by George Pal
and Joe Morhaim, which may have been intended
as the basis for a sequel to the original film, sends
another man on a search through time. These direct continuations of the story are not nearly as
significant as the vast number of unrelated time
travel stories and novels that are variations of the
concept Wells first formulated.