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The Time Machine

H. G. Wells · science fiction novella, 1895·3 hrs in the original·original at gutenberg.org
The 30‑second version3 hrs → 50 sec
  • Two species, one fate: The Time Traveller deduces that the class divide of his own era hardened over millennia into two separate species: the beautiful but intellectually vacant Eloi above ground and the industrious, carnivorous Morlocks below, with the Morlocks now farming the Eloi as livestock.
  • The machine stolen: The Morlocks drag the Time Machine inside the pedestal of the White Sphinx, stranding the traveller in 802,701 and forcing him to learn the world's dangers before he can recover it by outwitting them with matches and light.
  • Weena lost: The traveller's only companion, an Eloi woman named Weena, dies in a forest fire he accidentally starts while fighting off Morlocks during a night journey, leaving him utterly alone and grief-stricken.
  • The far future: Accidentally overshooting his return, the traveller witnesses Earth more than thirty million years hence: a tidally locked, nearly airless world under a dying red sun, its beaches crawling with giant crabs and finally stripped of almost all life.
  • Vanished without return: Back in his own time, the traveller departs again the very next day with a camera and knapsack, and the narrator confirms that three years later he has never come back, leaving only two withered flowers from Weena as evidence of the journey.
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•Why it earns a slot

The Time Machine is the founding text of far-future speculation in English fiction, introducing both the mechanical time-travel device and the idea that social class stratification, taken to its logical extreme, could biologically split the human species.

An unnamed Victorian inventor travels to the year 802,701 and discovers that humanity has split into two degenerate species: the frail, passive Eloi who live on the surface and the pale, subterranean Morlocks who tend machinery and prey on the Eloi at night. After losing his machine, surviving a forest fire in which his Eloi companion Weena perishes, and glimpsing a dying Earth tens of millions of years in the future, the Time Traveller recovers his machine and returns home, only to depart again and never come back.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.

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