The Time Machine
By H.G. Wells

I am embarrassed to say I have never read any H. G. Wells. I have rectified this recently however by reading his first novel, The Time Machine.

I should have done this years ago, perhaps as a teenager, because it was such a great book. I can understand why it was such a big success on publication in 1895: people were introduced to an author with a huge imagination and perhaps the first true science-fiction story. I enjoyed reading this immensely.

Not only an exciting adventure but thought provoking in a way that must have been quite unsettling to the readership back then. We not only travel to an almost unimaginably distant future of 802,701 AD but come to see what human evolution might mean; Darwin's theory being only a few decades old and still troubling to many. Wells was certainly not one to predict a heroic future progress of humanity. This might be one reason some critics and readers found him difficult. From Brian Aldiss' Billion Year Spree :

His audience is accustomed to powerful heroes with whom they can unthinkingly identify. A mass audience expects to be pandered to. Wells never pandered.

Perhaps a quote more applicable as his output increased, but a story where the human species can split into two, with one predating upon the other and all thought of science or art banished must have been hard to take. Even the idea of a deep "geological" time was fairly new (With Lyell's Principles of Geology published in 1830).

Wells' novel is brilliant. Now for The War of the Worlds I think.