The Time Machine

Table of Contents

 


About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

 


Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

 


Epilogue

Appendix

14

Afterword

Selected Bibliography

Introduction

BEFORE AIRPLANES, SPACE travel, and atomic energy, before freeways and traffic jams, poison gas and tanks, and just before the dawn of the twentieth century, a nameless inventor in London discovered a way to travel in time, using a mysterious machine assembled in a small private shop.

And an unknown journalist named Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) leaped in a few short years to fame and fortune.

If this is the first time you ve read The Time Machine, then stop right here. Skip over this introduction, for now, and get right to the story. When you re done, if you wish, come back and join the discussion. It s bound to be heated.

To this day, H. G. Wells is controversial, and I doubt he would have had it any other way!

 


Welcome back. Now how do you feel about time travel? Perplexed, skeptical, excited, a little sad?

By 1895, when The Time Machine was first published in book form, H. G. Wells had lived through years of ill health, married and parted, and tried on a career of teaching, then moved on to journalism and writing reviews. He did not seem very successful at anything, but he was enormously intelligent and ambitious. And he knew he had one story, one idea, one card up his sleeve that could possibly trump all of his disadvantages.

A man, traveling in time, using a machine.

A Time Traveller.

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometime shopkeeper, his mother a former lady s maid. Although Bertie left school at fourteen to become a draper s apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novel The Time Machine rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher s salary. His other scientific romances The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908) won him distinction as the father of science fiction. Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase the war that will end war to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me.
 
Greg Bear s novels and stories have appeared in more than twenty languages worldwide and have won numerous prizes, including two Hugos, five Nebulas, and the Prix Apollo. His novels include Darwin s Radio (winner of the Nebula and Endeavor awards), Darwin s Children, Vitals, Blood Music, Eon, Queen of Angels, and Moving Mars. He has served as a consultant and a lecturer on space and defense policy, biotechnology and bioterrorism, multimedia entertainment, and Internet issues.

Simon J. James is Professor of Victorian Literature at the Department of English Studies, Durham University. He is the editor of The Wellsian, the peer-reviewed scholarly