March 17, 2020
Returning to a novel you liked years ago is often a risky business, particularly so when the genre of that novel is science fiction. Nothing can age so rapidly as the past’s conception of the future, and what once seemed cutting edge may, after fifty years or more, appear simply ludicrous.
Because of this, I was delighted to find H.G. Wells' brief novel at least as charming and exciting as I remembered it, the Time Traveler’s scientific lecture still intriguing, the journey he describes still convincing, and the sociological history he reveals to us—of the evolution of the two races, the Eloi and the Morlocks, still as persuasive as it it was in 1895. (Okay, I admit, not quite as persuasive as evolutionary biology, but—given the rising gap between the rich and the poor—still compelling as a parable and cautionary tale.)
Although I remembered vividly both the origin and appearance of the Eloi and the Morlochs, I had forgotten much of the rest, and what I forgot made the book even better: 1) the delightful clarity of the Time Traveler's exposition to his audience of dinner guests about the nature of time as a dimension and the possibility of traveling through it, 2) the vivid description of the time-trip itself, a flickering cinematic-style vision, 3) the brutal destruction of the future of the English countryside, brought about by the Traveler’s reintroduction of fire, and 4) the end of his journey in a dying world of the far future, and the almost religious tone of his musings.
What was most clear to me, however, is how artfully H.G. Wells here combines scientific speculation, sociological parable, compelling adventure, and philosophical meditation. He both informs and delights, while never wearying his reader, in this book that is less than half the length of most of the first volumes of our current speculative fiction trilogies.
Still a classic, and one that our contemporary writers would do well to emulate.
