H.G Wells, The Time Machine Questions (1-29-18)

Cover of the playbill performed by Robert Lloyd Parry

Welcome to the first post of The Obsidian Man. Our first assignment for the class was to read H.G Well's The Time Machine (1895), and answer the following questions:

Q1: Why might a science of time be important for Wells’s Victorians, his late nineteenth-century readers? What are the larger implications of science of time, that is, beyond sci-fi and science proper?

A: Perhaps because the novel was published in 1895, the idea of “moving along time” hadn’t really been considered by the average person. People of the era we’re still very much rooted in the ideas and philosophies of traditional Victorian society. The rolls the of womn, men, and children of the time we’re extremely static, and institutions such as the church and monarchy dictated what could be considered “proper”. Even the free thinkers and scientists of the time probably didn’t want to disrupt the natural order of society by implying that events and moments in history could be relived or experienced again, or that a future beyond their direct influence would be available for others to explore.

Q2: Wells presents his story via a frame narrative, i.e., a story within a story. In what sense does that writerly choice help Wells’s story of time travel? 

A: I believe this choice was made so that the Time Travelers guests (and the reader) could understand that he had lived through this extraordinary experience, and had come back alive. This meant that no matter what traumatic events transpired during the story, that he was going to survive. Despite losing the time machine, despite being attacked by the Morlocks, we know he’s going to return because he's sitting at the dinner table eating meat and heavily drinking. More than just being able to return to the present, he has come back as a changed man. He has seen so far into the future that his story sounds like the insane jabberings of a mad man to his peers. It’s almost presented in a way that might possibly suggest he’s making up an elaborate story to entertain guests and possibly make headlines, that is until we see the final scene in which he disappears from the narrator's timeline.

Q3: Consider the Time Traveler’s speculative description of the Eloi in Chapter 4. What might Wells be suggesting about his own and future citizenry and why?

“‘A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children, they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy. The dinner and my conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all those who had surrounded me at first were gone. It is odd, too, how speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through the portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I was continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.” -H.G Wells The Time Machine (1895)

A: Wells is an English author of the 19th century, meaning he is of European descent, which also means he hails from a country that had (and still was) benefiting from the long-term effects of colonialism in countries such as India and parts of Africa. This brutal process involved a more modernized country going into a less advanced civilization and exploiting the people and natural resources of a country or region for personal gain. The people in these countries we’re often times considered “savages” by the noble Europeans, and we’re looked upon as undignified or as uncivilized. Perhaps Wells is making a slight underhanded bit of social commentary about the notion of European superiority. Even this man from roughly 780,000 years in the past looks down upon a civilization of people foreign to him because of his socially established sense of superiority. That, or he’s making a possible observation about how the future wealthy class (the 1%) will eventually become so reliant upon the working class (the Morlocks) that they cease to appreciate art, literature, and science in favor of a life of subdued and primal pleasures. In essence, they have become child-like.