The Time Machine
A Scientific Romance
He reached the end of time. What survived him was a flower and a question.
First chapter free on launch day
About the Book
A Victorian scientist builds a machine that travels through the fourth dimension, Time, and arrives in the year 802,701. What he finds is not Progress. It is its consequence.
Humanity has divided into two species: the beautiful, helpless Eloi who live in ruined palaces they did not build, and the pale, subterranean Morlocks who maintain the machinery and prey on the Eloi in the dark. The Traveller theorises the cause: the class divide of his own era, extended to its logical end.
He makes one friend in 802,701, a small Eloi woman named Weena, who puts flowers in his pocket. She is his most important discovery. The machine, when he recovers it, will carry only him home.
Cast, Evidenced
Each character as Wells described them. Every card receipted to the source.
The Time Traveller
The Inventor
“His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated.”
SMMB canon card · The Time Machine, Chapter IUnnamed throughout. Lean-fingered, grey-eyed, vigorous, clever. Lives in Richmond. Builds the Time Machine, travels eight hundred thousand years, and returns with a story no one quite believes and two white flowers he cannot explain.
Weena
The Companion
“she received me with cries of delight and presented me with a big garland of flowers—evidently made for me and me alone.”
SMMB canon card · The Time Machine, Chapter VIIIEloi woman rescued from drowning while others watched indifferently. Small, slender, fearless by day. She attaches herself entirely to the Time Traveller, kissing his hands, following him everywhere. Lost in the forest fire. Her flowers survive her.
The Eloi
The Upper World
“There was nothing in this at all alarming. Indeed, there was something in these pretty little people that inspired confidence—a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease.”
SMMB canon card · The Time Machine, Chapter VBeautiful, frail, vegetarian, incapable of sustained thought. They fear the dark absolutely. Clothed and fed by the Morlocks, who also harvest them at night. Their civilisation is in complete decay.
The Morlocks
The Underworld
“my light was blown out and in the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.”
SMMB canon card · The Time Machine, Chapter IXPale, ape-like, with great lidless pinkish-grey eyes adapted to the underground dark. Descended from the labouring class, driven below ground and transformed. They maintain the machinery, clothe the Eloi, and eat them.
The Narrator
The Witness
“The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”
SMMB canon card · The Time Machine, Chapter XVINever named. Attends both dinner parties. Transcribes the Time Traveller’s account faithfully. The only guest shown the machine the next morning. Keeps the two white flowers as evidence. Writes the Epilogue three years later.
The Medical Man
The Sceptic
“They were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.”
SMMB canon card · The Time Machine, Chapter XVIPhysician and dinner guest. At the story’s end he examines the white flowers, noting their odd gynaeceum and that he does not know the natural order of the plant. The only independent scientific scrutiny in the novel.
Launch Trailer
Trailer in production
A sixty-second film built from Wells’s text. No George Pal. No rotating dish. The real machine: nickel, ivory, and rock crystal in a Victorian workshop.
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