Novel: The Time Machine

Frame and Premise

A gentleman scientist known only as the Time Traveller hosts a group of Victorian skeptics for weekly dinners, using his salon as a laboratory for ideas. He argues that time is a fourth dimension and demonstrates a miniature machine that vanishes when activated. A week later he bursts in late, disheveled and starved, and recounts a journey on a full-sized Time Machine. One guest, the unnamed narrator, preserves the tale and his own doubts, giving the story its frame.

Arrival in the Year 802,701

The Time Traveller propels himself forward and stops in a strangely beautiful world of soft air and decaying splendor. He emerges near an enormous marble figure of the White Sphinx. The people he meets, the Eloi, are small, delicate, vaguely androgynous, and childlike in mind. They live in communal halls, wear tunics, eat fruit, and show little curiosity or industry. The Time Machine, left by the Sphinx, soon disappears into the pedestal, and the Traveller realizes he is stranded.

Eloi and Morlocks

As he explores, he senses an underlying menace: doors like ventilator shafts, a draft of cool air from underground, and strange nocturnal sounds. He rescues an Eloi named Weena from drowning and gains a companion, but learns little from the Eloi’s incurious chatter. In darkness he is gripped by pale, frail creatures with large eyes, the Morlocks, who live beneath the surface and operate the hidden machinery that sustains the decaying world above. The Traveller’s initial utopian fancy gives way to a social parable: the Eloi are the effete descendants of the leisured classes; the Morlocks, driven underground by class division and industrial labor, have adapted to darkness, and now prey upon the Eloi.

The Palace of Green Porcelain

In the ruin of a vast museum, the Palace of Green Porcelain, the Traveller scavenges matches, a lever for defense, and camphor for light. He plans to recover the Time Machine by prying open the Sphinx’s pedestal. Nightfall brings an attack in the woods. He flees with Weena amid a spreading fire that scorches the Morlocks but also disorients and exhausts him. Weena is lost in the chaos, likely perishing in the flames, and the Traveller, grieving and enraged, pushes on toward the Sphinx.

Escape and Far Futures

Back at the pedestal he finds the bronze panels open, a trap set by Morlocks. He stumbles into their ambush, leaps onto the machine, and, fumbling at the levers in total darkness, hurls himself forward in time. Curiosity draws him much farther ahead, to a desolate beach beneath a swollen, cooling red sun. Immense crab-like forms haul themselves over stale waters, and the air is thin and cold. He ventures still farther to the planet’s long twilight, where snow-like dust falls and a final, black, tentacled shape flops feebly on a silent shore. Overwhelmed by planetary death, he reverses to his own era.

Return and Vanishing

He arrives seconds after his departure from the point of view of his dinner guests, yet bearing days of experience on his body and clothes. The assembled men hear the story with alternating fascination and skepticism. The narrator returns the next day to find the Time Traveller packing for a brief, better-prepared excursion with a camera. He activates the machine and disappears forever. The narrator keeps two withered, unearthly white flowers that Weena had tucked into the Traveller’s pocket, poor botanical evidence, yet tangible tokens of kindness.

Themes and Significance

The story fuses scientific speculation with social critique, projecting Victorian class structures into evolutionary futures of decay. It treats progress as precarious, technology as ambivalent, and entropy as the universe’s final law. The unreliable frame underscores the tension between empirical proof and human testimony, while the flowers offer a fragile counterpoint: amid degeneration and cosmic extinction, gestures of care persist.