Rating: 
Summary: Past and present masterpiece
Review: This is the little number that started it all. For the English-speaking world (some translations of Verne possibly aside), science fiction begins with the four brief, brilliant novels published by H G Wells in the 1890s. The War of the Worlds is a still-unsurpassed alien invasion story; The Invisible Man one of the first world-dominating mad scientist tales; and The Island of Dr Moreau a splendidly misanthropic story of artificial evolution and genetic modification. But The Time Machine came first, launching Wells' career in literature; and, after just over a century, there still isn't anything nearly like it. A Victorian inventor travels to the year 802701, where the class divisions of Wells' day have evolved two distinct human races: the helpless, childlike and luxurious Eloi and the monstrous, mechanically adept and subterranean Morlocks. Predictably, the film version turned them into the usual Good Guys and Bad Guys, though it's still worth seeing, particularly for its conception of the Time Machine itself - a splendid piece of Victorian gadgetry. The book, despite its sociological-satirical premise, is rather more complex in its treatment of the opposed races, and the Time Traveller's voyage ends, not with them, but still further in the future, with images of a dead sun and a dark earth populated only by scuttling, indefinite shadows. As in the other three novels, too, the premise of the story is carefully worked out and clearly explained - a discipline largely beyond science fiction today, in which time travel, invading aliens or whatever are simply taken for granted as convenient genre props and automatic thought-nullifiers. After more than a century, The Time Machine is still waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
Rating: 
Summary: Future Shock
Review: This was the first book I read by HG Wells, at the age of 12. (I saw the film first.) After taking a trip into the future, a Time Traveller returns to the 19th century and tells his colleagues what he saw. In the distant future there is nothing, not a trace, of our world left. The Time Travller discovers a new society and finds that we have evolved into a puny, ineffectual race called Eloi. At night he discovers the other half of the society, the hideous, carniverous Morlocks. The Eloi live simple lives and play in the sun. They are food for the Morlocks, who live underground, operating machinery. The Time Traveller goes even further into the future, to a depressing world where the sun is dying and monstrous creatures roam the surface. Getting away from the point for a moment, there was once a "Doctor Who" story called "Timelash". In that story the Doctor travels back in time and meets a young writer called Herbert, who accompanies the Doctor on a journey to the future on another planet. There are monsters called Morlox. At the end of the story the young writer gives the Doctor one of his cards, which has the name HG Wells. The story implied that HG Wells' novel was inspired by the Doctor! But in reality "The Time Machine" paved the way for "Doctor Who", one of my favourite childhood shows. So we owe a lot to Wells. Time travel looks like a fun thing to do but sometimes it's best if the future is left unknown. Would you want to know your own future and find it's not what you hoped for?
Rating:
Summary: a dated but still an enjoyable classic..
Review: Written in 1895, 'The Time Machine' has a very dated, musty aspect to it. It's naive and far from realistic. But even if one discounts the over-simplicity of the story it is hard not to get caught into the strange, distant future world (greater London to be exact) created by H. G. Wells. His vision has been copied and arguably improved upon over the past century. However even now the story enthralls. And the compactness of the narrative, in a book scarcely over 100 pages, is remarkable.
Bottom line: yes, it is the sort of science fiction of your great-grandfather's generation. Thankfully it is still worth reading.
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