The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

The original cover

Decided to start up reviews of the books I’m reading. Lately I’ve been reading classics via free ebooks from Amazon’s Kindle Store. It’s been awesome. I admit I picked up Time Machine first because of the 2002 movie (because I had no idea there was a 1960s version until I Googled IMDb for The Time Machine a few minutes ago). You know, I had no clue how widely inaccurate that movie was.

Anyway, the novella follows a man simply dubbed the Time Traveler and his experiments with time. The Traveler creates a time machine and has a number of his equally unnamed friends (The Editor, The Medical Man, and so on) come over a few days after showing them a miniature model of his time machine to prove that he actually can travel in time. One of these is the unnamed narrator, who is writing down all that the Traveler is saying. I like to think this person is Wells himself, but that’s just me and my idealistic nature.

It turns out the Time Traveler goes forward to the year 802,701 AD. Yeah. That’s really far in the future. There he finds the fair and small Eloi, who live in a seemingly perfect world without disease. However, they fear the dark — and rightly so. The other race living at that time are the subterranean Morlocks. When the Traveler’s machine goes missing, he is forced to realize some dystopian-esque ideas about human nature as well as figure out the secrets the Eloi’s world holds.

I really loved this little novella, and it was the perfect sized book to read on an iPhone (more on that in a different post). The difference in grammar and style isn’t too bad, which surprised me, though I suppose it could’ve been adapted and changed over the years. It’s certainly worth a read, being one of the classic stories.

PS: I won’t rate the older books because there’s no real point.

What do y’all think? Have you read this book? Did you like it?