The time machine

Scene from "The time machine" (1960)

This novel had at least two versions and the first one was published in series format. 1895 is the year which inaugurates the era of fear of the future. The "time traveller" (his name is never said) travels to the year 802,701, where he finds a population reduced to two groups: the Elois and the Morloks. There has been a retrogression. The average height of the human beings is 1.20 meters and the Elois are treated as cattle and served as food to the Morloks. Wells says that this division of society is due to two kinds of life style: the practical and the idle. In other words, if the circunstances set by industrialization go on, the social abyss will lead to destruction. The traveler flees in terror to 30 million years in the future, where he sees the Sun's disappearance, London by the sea, and huge and sluggish crabs wandering about in the red sand. As he believes that the answer and the way of preventing destruction is in the past, that is the place he goes to in the last chapter. In the movie, the Elois are not as small and skinny as they are in the book, and the film producers did not show the sequence where the traveler sees the Sun disappear. The movie ends in a more optimistic way.

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