The idea of time travel has been in our media for a couple of years, especially in my young life. During the past two weeks of reading and learning about H. G. Wells's life as well as how he became, basically, the godfather of the time machine idea.
While I am in college, I have several books I have to read throughout the semester. Thankfully, I only have one class I have to go out and get a book for reading this semester. The Time Machine, while being a novella, came in a book that went through H. G. Wells's life, aspects of what others have said about his works, and further research that can be done to understand Wells and his story (we had a group project, so the research portion was nice).
Allow me to introduce you to the world of The Time Machine and her inventor's adventures.
Summary
The narrator is invited to a dinner party at the inventor's house where he later discusses how dimensions are formed and how the fourth dimension is time. His guests didn't believe him and were skeptical about his sanity. Until he showed a small prototype of his machine and later, the real one was still under production.
The following chapters are at a different dinner party where the narrator is once again invited as well as a couple of other guests from the first one and new ones. Oddly enough, the inventor is late to his own party though, the guests are instructed to continue and eat. The inventor arrives, limping and dirty, and he greets his guests and leaves again to get cleaned up.
When he arrives once more to join the others, he tells them about his adventures into the future, a couple of billions of years into the future. The inventor tells the group of what he believed were human's evolution into small, fury beings as well as monstrous ones, both species have different cultures and fears, and how and why he arrived limping and dirty as he was stuck for several days in this future. He also tells how he arrived and many other things he witnesses, both amazing and sad events he had to go through.
After telling the group these things, the party is still skeptical and soon leaves. However, the narrator comes back a few days later to witness the inventor with a camera and notebook. He realizes that the inventor is trying to go into the future again to get proof of his own travels.
Unfortunately, after he leaves, he doesn't come back.
Thoughts
I found this story hard to read in the sense that it took me the entire two weeks to read a 100–150-page short story. I didn't find it interesting and, since it was for school, hard to pick up or dreaded picking it up. It was slow, predictable, and stale.
Despite my uninterest in this story overall, the analysis I had to do with my peers allowed me to appreciate how thoughtful Wells was in his creation of the time machine and his idea of the fourth dimension. I believe the insight to nearly predict certain areas of today, guided by his life in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, was eye-opening. As a history geek, the number of similarities between the inventor's 'present' world versus what he witnessed in the future was heartbreaking.
Overall, I'd give it 3.5 out of 5 stars. I enjoyed the real-world findings but the story itself was just too slow for me. If I didn't write these items, it wouldn't be in my memory of what happened.
For You
Have you ever read this story? What are your thoughts and ideas, at all?
Just a reminder to go to "Book Review" to leave your recommendations on my next read as well as to know my thinking as to how I pick my next read.
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