The Time Machine

"I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands..." Have you ever dreamed about traveling through time? Here H. G. Wells leaps beyond the bounds of conventional imagination to tell the story of the Time Traveler, who pilots his machine to the year 802,700-and finds a world utterly changed. He finds an apparent utopia, populated by childlike people called the Eloi, living in ignorant bliss. He studies the creatures, planning to bring their secrets back to his own time. But his time machine is stolen, and he discovers the existence of a second, subterranean race, the hideous and vicious Morlocks. The Eloi are the ultimate upper class, useless and dependent. The simian Morlocks are the industrial proletariat, driven by centuries of desperation to depravity and cannibalism. In this caricature of a capitalist system run amok, the Time Traveler finds himself an alien on his own planet. The 1895 publication of The Time Machine catapulted H. G. Wells into immediate recognition, and has ever since been regarded as the masterpiece that defined the time travel genre.