December 15, 2014
Just as Wells was an early author of science fiction, he's also a founder of the time travel genre. Time travel is, of course, a common theme in sci-fi today. Dr. Who, Futurama, The Time Traveller's Wife, the Back to the Future series, and countless themed episodes of TV shows (like The Simpsons or Sabrina the Teenage Witch)...need I go on? What I loved about Wells's novel (over a century old) is that it stands up to the test of time (LOL!).
The main character is only called the Time Traveller. The narrator is an unnamed friend, recalling the Time Traveller's first go on his time machine. Now, Wells doesn't address the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle or the Predesination Paradox (the time travel theory that I personally like; I thought it was plausible that Fry was his own grandfather), or any early ideas of those theories, mainly because his character travels forward. Like, hundreds of thousands (then millions) of years forward, while never far from his geographic location.
The idea that humankind could eventually spliter off into two separate species holds up to my understandings of evolution, and Wells obviously knew his astronomy as he describes the decaying of the Sun and the reshaping of the solar system over eons of time. Good science fiction has to be plausible; if we're dealing with time travel, the path from here to there needs to make sense. Wells's story is both fantastic and plausible, and as I've already pointed out, this work has been influential.
I was curious to see what works may have influenced Wells himself. He is truly credited with bringing time travel to popular culture, but not long before him, other Western writers included such themes in their works. It seems that it was only in more recent time travel fiction that the theories of traveling back in time became prevalent, I think. Maybe in Wells's time, people couldn't fathom going back; go forward, see how civilization continues to improve! But the final message of the book reveals Wells's pessimism about "improvement," and that, like the weak little Eloi, to become complacent is to lose one's humanity and to become a lamb for slaughter. The Eloi and the Morlocks represent a bad side to evolution, as they've adapted to the conditions created by or forced on them, respectively. I think Wells was on to something. Two books in a row with negative views of the fate of humanity, and I can't say that I disagree.
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