The Time Machine

The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by the English writer H. G. Wells, first published in 1895, one of the works credited with popularizing the concept of time travel by mechanical vehicle in modern fiction. Framed as an account told by an unnamed inventor known only as the Time Traveller to a group of dinner guests at his London home, the novella describes his journey far into the future aboard a machine of his own invention, arriving first in the year 802,701, where he finds humanity apparently divided into two descendant species, the small, gentle, childlike Eloi who live an idle existence above ground amid the ruins of a vanished civilization, and the pale, ape-like Morlocks who dwell in darkness underground, tending machinery and, the Time Traveller gradually and horrifyingly realizes, emerging at night to prey on the Eloi as food. After rescuing an Eloi woman named Weena from drowning and losing her during a confrontation with the Morlocks over his stolen machine, the Time Traveller journeys even further forward, witnessing a dying Earth under a swollen, reddening sun in the planet's last habitable age before returning to his own time to tell his skeptical guests his story, then departing once more, never to return. Widely read as an allegory of Victorian class division, projecting the split between the leisured upper classes and an industrial working class into a far-future evolutionary divergence, the novella established many of the conventions of subsequent time-travel fiction and remains one of the foundational texts of modern science fiction.