Gathered around a dinner table in late 19th-century suburban London, a group of middle class and professional men listen to the theories about the nature of time expounded by one of their number. The theories sound fanciful until the man produces a miniature time machine and proceeds to make it vanish into thin air. A week later the guests, still sceptical, return and hear the fantastic story that their host, the Time Traveler, now has to relate. Using a larger version of his time machine, he has projected himself far into the future. In the world to which the traveler journeys, man has evolved into two distinct species, the gentle and beautiful Eloi and the troglodytic Morlocks who emerge from their underground dwellings only when night falls. At first the lotus life led by the Eloi seems an idyllic one but the theft of his machine and his dawning awareness of the relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks drive the Time Traveller to increasingly desperate attempts to return to his own time. After one final terrifying confrontation with the Morlocks, he recovers his machine and heads for home. Exhausted and bedraggled, he stumbles into the room in time to tell his tale. The next day, the Time Traveller vanishes again and no more is ever heard of him.

Like so much science fiction, the novella which made Wells's reputation is deeply rooted in the concerns of the period in which it was written. Late Victorian anxieties about the growing divide between the cultured classes and a supposed underclass in London's East End are clearly reflected in the relationship between the sybaritic Eloi and the darkly threatening Morlocks. Yet such is the power of Wells's imagination that The Time Machine transcends the particular circumstances that inspired it. More than a hundred years after its first publication, it remains one of the most compelling of all stories about voyages into the future.

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