The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

I’d known the story and seen several adaptations, but I realized I never read the novella. It’s really quick to read, once you get used to the vernacular and copious amounts of exposition. The language was particularly difficult since my dictionaries often didn’t include the archaic words. Perhaps having an OED by one’s side while reading would be good.

Overall, the book was okay. The story didn’t flow well, likely due to the action being described rather than experienced. This could be emblematic of stories from this time (1895). I did enjoy the descriptions of the stars and the sun, especially as he advanced even further into the future.

I loved his poking fun at writers, and human knowledge in general, as he describes the decayed books in a library in the far future. What he thought were simply tattered brown rags, he “presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books … Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.”

I also like his comments on the Haves and Have Nots, seen through a Darwinian lens, where workers become underground dwellers while the rich, who owned much of the land already, secured the upper world for themselves. It’s funny that I scribbled down this comment then a few sentences later, saw it almost verbatim in the text Wells wrote.