2024 read #30: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.*

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells*

216 pages

Published 1895

Read March 2

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Tim Sullivan’s story “Dinosaur on a Bicycle” (which I read and reviewed in the March 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction) was an effective and affectionate pastiche of Wells’ The Time Machine, so much so that I decided to revisit that classic novel immediately after wrapping up that review. It was a childhood favorite of mine, which I first read not long after The War of the Worlds. It’s a short and vivid book that left an outsize impression on my adolescent imagination. I know it won’t hold up to modern standards, but I haven’t reread it as an adult, so why not check it out again? At least it's a quick read.

Seemingly every entry-level commentary on The Time Machine picks up on Wells’ socialist class conflict narrative. What interests me more nowadays, as a would-be student of the evolution of science fiction and its ideological underpinnings, is how central a role the Victorian conceit of social evolution plays here. “Struggle improves the race” was the Victorian aristocracy’s way of incorporating Darwinian theory without upsetting their own social myths of racial, gender, and religious superiority. Even socialist Wells was unable to conceptualize that humanity evolved intelligence hand in hand with social systems and cooperation, enmeshed as he was in the mores of empire.

What’s most remarkable about this self-serving ideological gloss is not that it appeared this early — the entire rickety structure has Victorian roots, after all — but that it persisted so late. It pervades the Campbellian sci-fi of the 20th century, and was taken as accepted wisdom well into the 1990s. Hell, you’ll still find “comfort leads to decadence” ideology lurking around corners of SFF to this day. Clearly, it survived so long because science fiction’s primary audience (comfortably well-off heterosexual white men) was still served by it. (It’s the ideology of empire and hierarchy, after all.)

On its own merits, The Time Machine is a crisp adventure tale, efficiently structured, doling out each piece of the puzzle of 802,701 AD exactly when it’s needed. It’s better written and more effectively plotted than most scientific romances or tales of scientifiction would manage to be well into the 1940s. (Wells himself only wrote a handful of novels as good as this one, for that matter.) It isn’t particularly deep fiction, unless you’re reading it at 10 years old, but it’s entertaining and manages to do exactly what it sets out to do. If only more stories from the ensuing fifty years of pulp could say the same.