Although I've finished the book, I've only just noticed that there are only twelve chapters, not sixteen. At least, my copy and the on-line version mentioned by skylarb only have twelve chapters.

And the first five chapters take up more than half the text. So I think we might throw the whole book open for discussion after the weekend.

Sounds good to me! I'd better get a wriggle on.

Thank you Tabby for mentioning that. I thought I had an incorrect version and was going to run to the library this weekend to see what was wrong with my book. I only have 12 chapters in mine.

Hmmmmm...my copy from the public library, was published in 1971, by Robert Benctley, Inc. has 16 chapters. It says the text is supposedly a the reprint of the 1895 version. This copy also has a wonderful biography on Wells from "Twentieth Century Authors" on the back and inside cover. Maybe that's why this copy reads so quickly--the text is in shorter chapters.

Don't wait for me , all. Really sorry, it doesn't really appeal, and I am up to my neck in Summer School, too. Later, I shall read all your comments as usual with great interest.
I will join you in September XX

Finished it last night, and...I was disappointed. It IS a very short book---I'd call it a novella, rather than a novel. And unlike most of Wells' other work, it just left me feeling like "Is that all there IS?"

I won't say more until I'm sure the rest of you have finished.

Well, since "The Time Machine" didn't appeal to most people, there doesn't seem much use for me to keep discussing it. Frankly, I don't think a book has to be obsure to read or 8000 pages long to be a classic.

I think ren was the only one who said she did not want to discuss the book, and most people seem already to have finished the book well before the end of the month, so I don't see why you're giving up on it!

I certainly don't think a book must be either long or obscure to be a classic; I just don't personally like the style of writing; but I am interested in the story and intend to read through to completion...I'm just moving a little more slowly than the rest of the group. I will be back to comment and pose quesitons.

I actually had one preconceived idea coming in before this book, that i was afraid to share in case it really happened and would spoil the book. For some reason I thought that the Traveller had invented the time machine to travel to the past and undo a death of a loved one and that no matter how he tried to correct it, the future still happened. Now I've seen the episode of the Simpsons one to many times where Homer steps on something in the past, or kills a big and the future is altered forever. Silly me

I actually liked the book. It was a new genre for me--although I do read the occasional Star Wars book (blame that on my husband). I'm glad you introduced us LindaC to a new book, and a classic that I will have on my shelf.

I was only slightly disappointed that there wasn't more substance to it. I wondered if the Traveller had formed a bond with the era and went back to it. And I wonder if he ever tried to move his machine to another location to see how the world fared in the future. It was curious also how far into the future he travelled, in essence to discern if and when man would eventually die out. Why do you think he assumed that man would die out?

There is a unique show on the Animal Planet channel here in the states that explores this idea a bit. It takes the knowledge of the present animals on this planet and explores what types of animals would actually be on this earth in say 150 million years.

The type of Utopian society that the traveller exposed the readers to gave me chance for pause. Is that what he saw mankind coming to? Albeit it had its share of good points, idealic location and warm weather. He was hard pressed to find illness and death in his short stay, but he also describe the people as near idiots who lived in a symbotic relationship with the Moorlocks, their ugly cousins who had been relegated to the underworld. I guess in my musings on the future, and it was never the far future, that mankind would come to a stalemate. After warmongering and epidemic illness had ravaged the earth, they would eventually realize a change was in order and become a somewhat peaceful society, becoming diplomats as opposed to warriors. Obviously Star Trek re-runs have influenced my way of thinking.

Lindac you mentioned once in an earlier post that it was possible that the Traveller never even left his house, that his travellings and ramblings were part of his mind created by a very lonely and focused person. I thought that was intriguing and hoping you could expand upon that a bit.

I took the day off of work and so have been doing a bit of research into HG Wells' and the "Time Machine" and here are a few tidbits I thought I'd pass along:

"Wells had been subjected to the cruel class prejudices of his
day. He saw what we would call a glass ceiling being placed over his hopes and dreams, regardless of his level of talent. By creating two sub-species of the future and calling them the Eloi and the Morlocks, Wells found a voice for his feelings about the extent of the unadmitted prejudice in England and what this was doing to people. He did not romanticize either the upper classes, the Eloi, or the lower classes, the Morlocks. He simply showed them slowly moving
away from each other and becoming two ENTIRELY different species." --from Univ of Arizona

A website I use frequently called PinkMonkey offers a suggestion as to another major theme in this book:

" Time Machine questions the assumption that most people held at the end of the 19 th century (and continue to hold today) that humankind will continue to progress, and that improvements in society and culture are a given thing. Though Wells’s story on some levels might be considered optimistic, in his realistic portrayal of what might be possible to do with science, it is extremely pessimistic, offering a warning of the unfettered and unthinking trust in “progress,” scientific and otherwise."

The same website also offers the thought that Wells' concluded that human emotion and sympathy were two traits that stood the test of time.

The site also presented a very interesting question: As a scientist exploring the future, does he have any obligations or codes of conduct that he should follow? Do you think he handles his situation well?

Skylarb is right, I have read the book, and it seems very ungracious of me not to discuss it with anybody who still wishes to do so. I have always done my best, in a positive way, to support the selections of the book club, simply because I thought it was a good idea for adults to be able to read a book together.

I think those who have not watch any of the "The Time Machine" movies are better served than those who have. The movies are full of action, seen from the first person viewpoint. The book style is like that of James Hilton's lovely novel "Lost Horizons", because in both books, the story is told to acquaintanes after the fact. Personally, "War of the Worlds" is my favorite H.G. Wells novel, because the action is told as the story goes along, not in retrospective.

My first thought was: Had the time traveler really gone anywhere? We can hardly take as evidence the disappearance of his miniature time machine, can we? It could be easily explained as a magic trick, and we know the time traveler was certainly intelligent to "vanish" it by sleight-of-hand. Just coming in from the back of his house, with his clothes and in disaray and in almost a state of shock does say he has been through a great ordeal, but it certainly doesn't mean he has gone through a trip into time, does it? Just ask yourself, if you had been in his friends' place, would you have believed him? Or, if a friend of yours came in, suffering from shock with their clothes in disarray and told you they had been kidnapped by a UFO or seen a ghost? You would know that certainly traumatic something had happened to them, but would you believe them on just their word alone? The answer to what really happened to the time traveller is not told until the very end.

I wonder if life being too easy is ever a healthy thing? I don't mean that suffering horrible poverty or hardships is a good thing, but is it good to have everything handed to us on a silver platter? Don't we need ambition?

I have read the Bradbury story that skylarb mentions about how changing one tiny thing in the future can completely alter the present. I'm sorry I don't remember the title of the story, though.

Has anyone though of what might happen to the future is someone like Adolf Hitler could have escaped his fate and traveled into the future? Or what would happen to the presnt if someone like that escaped back into time? It really opens up a lot of thought.

Tom's history of the various editions of "The Time Machine" was really interesting. I appreciate him taking the time to post it up.

Also, I wish the Time Traveler had been given a name. It comes back to the old Filby question: Why does Filby have a name and the time traveler does not?

The Traveller had once mentioned he had planned to bring Weena back with him, but circumstances had prevented him. Do you think it would have been right or justified for him to do so in the name of science? As a traveller, whether in our present time or supposing one had the ability to travel in the past or future, is there an ethic that the person should be bound to? Should that individual be able to take anything with him, or bring anything back with them?

Hey, if you can figure out how to travel through time than by all means bring yourself back a trophy.

But, seriously, I think it all depends on weather Weena was willing to go with him. As for objects, I don't see a problem with that, provided you aren't stealing from an owner.

If I can figure out how to travel to time I promise to tell the forum and then go back and ask HG Wells what the Traveller's name was and who the heck is Filby

Many of the Time Traveller's and Wells's contemporaries would have seen nothing wrong in bringing people back to their own culture from other places or times. There was something of a tradition of exhibiting "noble savages" and so on in Britain and Europe. A notable early example was Omai, a Tahitian brought back to England by Captain Cook. He seems to have been treated well and to have enjoyed his stay in Britain; but to have alienated his fellow-Tahitians on his return. There's a bit about him here. In Wells's time, Buffalo Bill's "Wild West Show" toured Britain with its "Red Indian" members.

Nowadays, we are probably less confident of the morality of uprooting people in this way. But then, we can now film people's activities and interview them on film; there is little need to bring people across the world to satisfy our curiosity. But if we had not developed our technology in this way, I daresay we might still be carrying on the old tradition.

As skylarb says, it would depend on whether Weena wanted to come. I would add that the Traveller ought to give her a full understanding of what sort of world she would be going to.

Is it possible that the Travellor could only interact with people whose lives couldn't affect his, any actions he takes in the past or the future are going to affect his own life to some degree. Maybe Weena was linked to him genetically and bringing her back would break the chain and she or he would therefore not exist.

With apologies for multi-posting.

I've just been poking around in one of my books "In Search of the Edge of Time" written by John Gribbin, and found the following excerpt taken from Chapter 7 - Two ways to build a time machine:

Quote >>> This idea of time as in some sense a fixed and unalterable dimension seems to have been first propounded by H G Wells in his famous story The Time Machine, which first appeared in book form in 1895. Exactly ten years before Einstein published his special theory of relativity, and even longer before Minkowski described the special theory in terms of four-dimensional spacetime geometry, Wells wrote 'there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space, except that our consciousness moves along it.' The fictional time traveller of the story describes what we perceive as a three-dimensional cube as in fact being a fixed and unalterable four-dimensional entity, extending through time and therefore having as its dimensions length, breadth, thickness and duration. But the problem with all this is, if everything is fixed in four dimensions, how can the time traveller have any influence on the events he becomes involved with later in the story?
According to Wells' own justification for the adventures, everything, including the traveller's intervention in the future, is already fixed and predetermined. Which seems to take the fun out of life.<<<

...and I dared to refer to Wells' 'technic-speak' as a warm-up for an after-dinner story. Shame on me!

The science behind the 'technic-speak' can be found at
http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/Time_Travel.html

Thoughts??

It comes to me that maybe Wells is using his time travel to show just how pitifully the humans of the future have become. On one hand, we have these beautiful, delicate people who can't even provide food and clothe themselves, and on the other, we have these horrible, night walkers who have sunk as low as humans can by raising the Eloi for food. What is so bad is that, on the surface, it is such a perfect world--no sickness, a beautiful Eden-like atmosphere, but underneath, it's all horribly warped and bent.

The Radio Broadcast That Panicked America

On Oct. 30, 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre performed a radio play "War of the Worlds" on ABC New York and over the Columbia Broadcasting network, coast to coast. It was based on a science fiction story by H.G. Wells (no relation) which entailed Martians landing in New Jersey to take over the world. The imagery produced through sound effects and editing was so powerful, it caused mass hysteria as thousands of listeners panicked nationwide, not realizing it was a radio play, even though disclaimers were announced brfore and during the performance.

How bad was it? The next day, "The New York Times" ran this headline:

Radio Listeners in Panic Taking War Drama as Fact

Many Flee Homes to Escape 'Gas Raid From Mars--'Phone Calls Swamp Police at Broadcast of Wells Fantasy

"Untied Press reported the federal communications commission investigated a radio program which caused thousands of persons in every part of the country to believe that the eastern United States had been invaded by creatures from the planet Mars in the first engagement of a "war between the worlds".

The above comes from:

http://radio.about.com/library/weekly/aa102302a.htm

To listen to the original broadcast and read the actual script, go to:

http://www.waroftheworlds.org/the_broadcast.htm

I'll go you one better, Linda---I think the 'future' the Traveler described was just a thinly-disguised description of how Wells percieved his present. As mentioned above, Wells highly resented the social division between the 'upper' and 'lower' classes in the England of his day. Perhaps he saw England's upper classes as useless Eloi, beautiful and pampered, eating the food and wearing the clothing provided by the working lower classes, contributing nothing on their own---yet, at the same time, very literally allowing the lower-class, working-stiff Morlocks to eat, because it was the upper classes who owned all the factories, etc., at which the lower classes earned their daily bread.

I do think that, within the confines of the story, the Traveler DID journey in time--Wells was very interested in science, and expected science to do magical things in the future. But you're right, the traveler seems to gone off exceedingly ill-prepared for the journey! I also found it difficult to understand why he'd make his first journey so very far into the future.

Sort of changing the subject, but have any of you seen Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"? This silent film came out in 1926, and it too protrays a future---although one MUCH nearer in Time---where the workers live and labor far underground, in order to support an upper class that appears to do nothing but play.

I'm a big science fiction fan, and I find it interesting to look at the different ways we've pictured the future, over the past 100+ years.