The fact that the story is that of an unnamed narrator, but is in turn told by a similarly unnamed narrator, already positions the reader in such a way that they feel removed from the situation. Perhaps whats so fascinating about this book is its sense of utter alienation.

It turns out that our future selves have split into two separately evolving groups, and our unnamed narrator spends his voyage attempting to understand the habitus of each. But simple, linear evolution is not all that he encounters. And during this time he has had a truly unusual ethnographic encounter: he finds himself living amongst a society of human so far evolved that they are scarcely recognisable. The man, it turns out, has 'spent a good deal of time as a time tourist some eight hundred thousand years in the future. This famous novella is the account of an unnamed narrator, a scientist and futurist, who claims to have returned from a rather long-distance voyage indeedbut by long-distance, I mean, of course, chronologically rather than geographically. And though it didnt quite strike the same readerly chord with me as The Invisible Man ( see my review), I cant help but admit that Wells is in good form with this novel. Its one of those speculative novels that stands ahead of the crowd for several reasons: its themes of evolution and social class (er, and time travel), its status as one of the early popular works of science fiction, and its readability. Wellss The Time Machine scarcely needs an introduction, so deeply incised is it on our collective social consciousness.

The time machine book hg wells