Sample Book Review
1. Title
of the Book:
The Time Machine
2. Author
of the Book:
H.G. Wells
3.
Country:
United Kingdom
4.
Language:
English
5. First originally
published by:
William Heinemann, London in 1895.
3. was
the book a best seller? Yes
4. Genre: Science Fiction Novel
5. Cost
of the Book:
$2.70
6. Name
of the Publisher:
Dover Publications
7.
Edition and year of Copyright: April 3, 1995
8. No. of
pages:
80
9. Introduction:
The
Time Machine was first published in 1894 as a serial under the name The Time
Traveller in the National Observer. It was brought out as a book the next year
under its current name and sold more than six thousand copies in a few months.
H. G. Wells was just twenty-seven years old when the story, which came to be
called a "scientific romance," was published. Wells's friend, William
Henley, edited the National Observer, and Wells became part of a group of
writers called "Henley's young men." The novel's appeal lies in its
attempt to fathom what will become of human beings in the distant future. By
making the central character of his story a time traveler who can transport
himself back and forth in time with the aid of a machine he invented, Wells is
able to explore many of the themes that obsessed him, including class
inequality, evolution, and the relationship between science and society. In
describing the future world of the effete Eloi and the cannibalistic Morlocks
and the world beyond that in which all semblance of human life has been erased,
Wells illustrates what he believes may very well be the fate of humanity. The
novel's enduring popularity is evident in the three films adapted from the
novel and the scores of others inspired by it.
10. About
the Author:
Herbert George Wells was born in a working class family in 1866. He came from a
poor background, which was unusual for a writer at that time. He won a
scholarship to study science at university. With a first-class degree in
biology, he briefly became a teacher. His career in the classroom was ended by a
sharp kick in the kidneys from an unhappy pupil, which left him too unwell to
continue teaching. He then lived on a small income from journalism and short
stories, until his literary career took off with his first science fiction
novel, The Time Machine, in 1895.
Wells wrote with tremendous energy throughout
his life, producing many science fiction stories, short stories, sociological
and political books, autobiographical novels and histories. He became very
successful as a writer, perhaps because his work was both popular and
intellectual, and he lived in some style. He married twice and had a reputation
as a womaniser. He moved in socialist circles and used fiction to explore his
political ideas. Wells died in 1946.
11.
Summary:
A group of men, including the narrator, is listening to the Time Traveller
discussing his theory that time is the fourth dimension. The Time Traveller
produces a miniature time machine and makes it disappear into thin air. The
next week, the guests return, to find their host stumble in, looking disheveled
and tired. They sit down after dinner, and the Time Traveller begins his story.
The Time Traveller had finally finished work on
his time machine, and it rocketed him into the future. When the machine stops,
in the year 802,701 AD, he finds himself in a paradisiacal world of small
humanoid creatures called Eloi. They are frail and peaceful, and give him fruit
to eat. He explores the area, but when he returns he finds that his time
machine is gone. He decides that it has been put inside the pedestal of a
nearby statue. He tries to pry it open but cannot. In the night, he begins to
catch glimpses of strange white ape-like creatures the Eloi call Morlocks. He
decides that the Morlocks live below ground, down the wells that dot the
landscape. Meanwhile, he saves one of the Eloi from drowning, and she befriends
him. Her name is Weena. The Time Traveller finally works up enough courage to
go down into the world of Morlocks to try to retrieve his time machine. He
finds that matches are a good defense against the Morlocks, but ultimately they
chase him out of their realm. Frightened by the Morlocks, he takes Weena to try
to find a place where they will be safe from the Morlocks' nocturnal hunting.
He goes to what he calls the Palace of Green Porcelain, which turns out to be a
museum. There, he finds more matches, some camphor, and a lever he can use as a
weapon. That night, retreating from the Morlocks through a giant wood, he
accidentally starts a fire. Many Morlocks die in the fire and the battle that
ensues, and Weena is killed. The exhausted Time Traveller returns to the
pedestal to find that it has already been pried open. He strides in
confidently, and just when the Morlocks think that they have trapped him, he
springs onto the machine and whizzes into the future.
The Time Traveller makes several more stops. In
a distant time he stops on a beach where he is attacked by giant crabs. The
bloated red sun sits motionless in the sky. He then travels thirty million
years into the future. The air is very thin, and the only sign of life is a
black blob with tentacles. He sees a planet eclipse the sun. He then returns,
exhausted, to the present time. The next day, he leaves again, but never
returns.
12. Plot: H. G. Wells’s
fascination with the idea of time travel into the future was first expressed in
his story “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888). He wrote at least four other versions
before the first book publication of The Time Machine: An Invention in 1895.
The Time Machine is a frame narrative. The
outer narrator, Hillyer, briefly sets the scene for the much longer inner
narrative, the Time Traveler’s story about his experiences in the future.
Hillyer concludes the narrative with a description of the subsequent
disappearance of the Time Traveler and offers a brief speculative epilogue.
Hillyer is one of a group of professional men
who regularly gather for dinner and conversation at the Time Traveler’s house.
One evening, the host explains to his skeptical visitors that he has discovered
the principles of time travel. He demonstrates a miniature time machine and
shows his visitors an almost-completed full-sized version in his laboratory.
At Hillyer’s next visit, the Time Traveler
enters, disheveled and limping but eager to tell his visitors about his travels
in the far future. He begins by graphically describing the subjective effects
of compressing years into moments of time. He then tells them how he arrived in
c.e. 802,701 and encountered a race of creatures, evolved from humans, called
Eloi. They are small, frail, gentle, childlike vegetarians. He theorizes that
humanity has reached a state of contented inactivity in harmony with nature.
Soon thereafter, the time machine vanished into the hollow pedestal of a
statue, and he realized that this future world harbored disturbing secrets.
Other occurrences made him determined to
explore the mysteries beneath the placid surface of the world. He discovered
the Morlocks, small, apelike creatures who tended vast machines in dark caverns
and visited the surface only during the night. He concluded that the Eloi and
Morlocks were the descendants of the capitalist and laborer classes of his own
time and that social separation had led to the evolution of two distinct human
species. He also learned to his horror that the Morlocks killed and ate Eloi.
He and Weena, an Eloi female whom he had saved
from drowning, then visited a ruinous museum in the hope of finding some means
of freeing the time machine from the Morlocks. On their return journey, they
were surrounded by Morlocks at night in a forest. Weena was lost, but the Time
Traveler escaped. He returned to the statue and found the pedestal open. He
mounted the time machine as the Morlocks sprang their trap but was able to
escape by traveling in time.
Curious about Earth’s fate, he voyaged farther
into the future and found that all traces of humanity had vanished. More than
thirty million years hence, he found himself on a desolate beach facing a
swollen red sun, life having devolved to the point of extinction. Horrified, he
returned to his own time.
Hillyer, deeply affected by the Time Traveler’s
story, returns the next day to find his host about to depart. Invited to wait,
he does so, but in vain.
13.
Setting:
There is but one physical setting for the entire story, but three temporal
settings are used over the course of the novel. The book begins in late 19 th
century London, specifically, in the Time Traveller’s home in Richmond, a
borough on the Thames River, on the outskirts of London. The dining room,
smoking room, and laboratory are the only rooms seen and are not fully
described, as they are only the setting for the narrative frame which surrounds
the real story, told by the Time Traveller himself. The men gather in the smoking
room, seating themselves around the Time Traveller, who sits near the fireplace
and begins to tell his tale in the dim light of the fire’s glow.
The most important setting--the time and place
in which most of the story takes place--is still the site of the Time
Traveller’s house and the area surrounding it, but hundreds of thousands of
years into the future. In the year 802701, the buildings that once formed
London are completely gone, and all that can be found are the buildings used by
the aboveground dwellers, a very large statue of a Sphinx-like creature, the
ruins of several other structures and scattered circular wells. Everything else
has gone back to nature; trees and flowers fill the Thames Valley.
The third temporal setting is even farther into
the distant future, thirty million years hence, and the landscape is even more
dramatically different. Now the Thames Valley is a desolate beach, facing an
aging ocean with no waves, only an occasional swell. Large white butterflies
and huge crablike creatures populate the world, and even further in the future,
the crabs are gone and only lichen and an amorphous black creature remain.
14.
Writing style:
Narrative
15. Character
Analysis:
The Time
Traveller: A
well-read and intelligent man of science. He is versed in the theories of his
day, and very clearly a Darwinist, like Wells himself, and his thoughts echo
much of Wells’s own theories about the Britain of his time. He is a man of
observation, and muses quite a bit about his surroundings, in an attempt to use
logical thinking to draw conclusions about the future and its inhabitants. The
Time Traveller has a sense of humor about almost everything he encounters, and
accepts his friends’ skepticism. Witty and somewhat of a joker, this aspect of
his personality is part of the reason his friends so quickly dismiss his story
and demonstration as a joke.
The
Narrator, Hillyer: One of the three men
present at both dinners. The narrator is the only character who gives any
credence to the Time Traveller’s claims; he seriously considers the possibility
of time travel.
Eloi: A peaceful but weak and
lethargic people who populate the surface of the earth in the year 802701.
Small in stature, and delicate featured, the Eloi play all day, feast on fruit
in great halls, and sleep in a large communal chambers in order to protect
themselves from the dark and the possibility of Morlock attack. Easily tired
and childlike, they are not interested intellectual pursuits, or in the Time
Traveller beyond his function as a diversion.
Morlocks:
An
aggressive, predatory, ape-like “people” who live beneath the earth’s surface
in the year 802701. The Morlocks are the descendants of the working class of
the late 19 th century, and continue to labor, maintaining and running huge
machines deep in the earth. The have adapted physically to life beneath the
surface, with large, eyes very sensitive to light, and light, unpigmented skin
and fur. Carnivores, they feast on the Eloi, who they maintain as a source of
meat.
Weena: An Eloi who the Time
Traveller saves from drowning. She becomes a special friend of the Time
Traveller, following him around and occasionally serves as a source of
information. She eventually is attacked by the Morlocks and dies in the forest
fire.
16. Your
Impressions : The
time traveller’s machine is described in such sketchy terms that it can
scarcely be believed as an instrument of science, and the time traveller’s
account is similarly sketchy and bizarre. The very nature of time travel means
that he’s away for only a short period of time, and the only “proof” of his
travels is a crunched up flower. And given that the narrative is told in a
twice-removed manner, the reader can’t help but wonder whether any of the novel
is true at all. Did the time traveller truly engage in such chronological
shenanigans, and did he experience what he claims? Or is he simply using an
imagined future to provide a warning about the current state of society? But
the reality is that neither the truth, nor the journey matters: it’s only the
outcome.
17. Your ratings:
****