The Time Machine

A Victorian inventor builds a machine that travels through time, and returns with news of the year 802,701.

A man known only as the Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that time is a fourth dimension, and later comes back with a story to prove it. He has ridden a machine of his own making into the far future, where he meets two very different peoples and has to decide what they are. H. G. Wells’s 1895 novella gave the world its phrase “time machine”.

First published: 1895
Literary form: novella
Original language: English
Published text languages: English · Vietnamese
Reading time: ≈ 2 h 15 min read

Read · English

A cloth book cover in tan with the title and author’s name stamped in dark red and a winged sphinx at the centre. — Illustration of this work. Front cover of a William Heinemann edition of The Time Machine, 1895, with a winged sphinx (a sphinx stands in the story’s future landscape). University of Illinois copy; lower edge cropped to remove a digitisation watermark.Front cover, The Time Machine, London: William Heinemann, 1895. Public domain (published 1895; author died 1946). University of Illinois copy via Wikimedia Commons. Source

Why it matters

The Time Machine is short, fast and strangely calm. A gentleman inventor sits in a lamplit room and describes, without panic, what he found in the year AD 802,701. It still reads as alive because Wells wastes no time on gadgetry. The machine is a vehicle for a question: what happens to people when their conditions of life are pulled far enough apart? The answer he imagines is unsettling in the way a good argument is, and it keeps the book on syllabi and reading lists well beyond the age of the genre it helped start.

Wells began with a story called The Chronic Argonauts (1888) in his college paper, rewrote it as seven essays in the National Observer in 1894, then as a serial in the New Review from January to May 1895, for which he was paid £100. Holt published the first book edition in the US on 7 May 1895, and Heinemann followed in Britain on 29 May. Wells coined the term “time machine”, and the book is credited with making time travel a deliberate, controllable act. It is also an early example of the dying-Earth story. The 1960 film by George Pal and a 2002 remake followed.

Watch the two peoples the Traveller meets, the Eloi and the Morlocks, and how his explanation of them changes as he learns more; Wells presents them as descendants of the upper and lower classes, and the book is often read as a comment on class inequality. Wells had studied biology under T. H. Huxley and joined the socialist Fabian Society, and both show in the book’s thinking. The ending is open-ended; read the last pages slowly and note what the narrator does and does not claim.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.

Themes

Time as a fourth dimension
Class division and its consequences
Evolution and decline
Scientific confidence and its limits
The far future of humankind

Context

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) trained in biology at the Normal School of Science in London and wrote this, the first of his scientific romances, in the mid-1890s; The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds followed in the next three years. It first appeared in the New Review in 1895.

Before you read

Short, brisk and easy to follow, with a framing dinner-party narration. Content note: some violence and Victorian class and evolutionary assumptions that the book itself examines.

Good to know

First published: Serialised in the New Review, January–May 1895; US book edition (Holt) 7 May 1895, UK edition (Heinemann) 29 May 1895
Origin: Grew from “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888), a story in Wells’s college paper
Coinage: Wells coined the term “time machine”

Sources for this introduction

All editions

Original · source checked

The Time Machine

English

The Time Machine · English, Project Gutenberg #35

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Translation · AI reviewed

Cỗ máy thời gian

Tiếng Việt

Bản dịch tiếng Việt bằng AI · đánh giá AI v2

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Translation availability is still being researched. A draft is not evidence that no translation exists.

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