- Published: 5 January 2017
- ISBN: 9781473546813
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 128
The Time Machine
A brilliantly imaginative flight of fancy from the father of science fiction, or a prophetic vision of the future of the planet?
Brilliantly imaginative fiction or the shape of things to come? H.G. Wells's masterpiece still retains its power to provoke and enthral.
In the Time Traveller's miraculous new machine, we will be carried from a Victorian dinner table to 802,701 AD, when the Earth is divided between the gentle, ineffective Eloi, and the ape-like Morlocks; forward again by a million years or so to glimpse a dying world of blood-red beaches and menacing shapes; and on again to the last days of our planet, a remote twilight where nothing moves but darkness and a cold wind.
- Published: 5 January 2017
- ISBN: 9781473546813
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 128
Other books in the series
About the author
H. G. Wells, the third son of a small shopkeeper, was born in Bromley in 1866. After two years' apprenticeship in a draper's shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories and programmes for world regeneration.
Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. His prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress, whose anticipations of a future world state include The Shape of Things to Come (1933). His controversial views on sexual equality and women's rights were expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, 'an important liberator of thought and action'.
Wells drew on his own early struggles in many of his best novels, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). His educational works, some written in collaboration, include The Outline of History (1920) and The Science of Life (1930). His Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., 1934) reviews his world. He died in London in 1946.
Praise for The Time Machine
A seminal work of dystopian fiction, Wells's tale of the voyages of the Time Traveller in the distant future (AD 802,701) is also a cracking adventure story.
Sunday Telegraph
In its decency and commitment to the future, its dramatisation of its hero's moral and imaginative reach, The Time Machine is as good a testament as any to the values and achievement of one of our bravest and most stimulating writers, one whose best work comically or horrifically continues to feel as if it bodies forth the shape of things to come.
Independent on Sunday
A master writer who led a lot of people out of superstition and hopelessness
Guardian