The Man Who Invented Science Fiction

The Time Machine was H.G. Well’s first novel. Published in 1895, when he was twenty-eight years old, he had studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley—Darwin's most ferocious public defender—and was a young man with a scientific education, a radical political conscience, and a robust imagination. The Time Machine announced him to the world with the confidence of someone who had been waiting to say something important and had finally found the form to say it in.

And what he said was not reassuring.

The novel's surface premise—an unnamed Victorian inventor builds a machine that travels through time—is so familiar now that it's almost impossible to recover the shock of its original conception. But during Wells’ time, there was no template for this. He invented the idea of a mechanical vehicle for time travel from nothing, and the term time machine itself didn't exist before he coined it. Every film, every novel, every piece of fiction that has ever sent a character backward or forward through history owes its basic vocabulary to this book.

But Wells wasn't writing an adventure story. He was writing a warning.

The Time Traveller journeys not to the past but to the year 802,701 (a year so far away and beyond comprehension that it’s almost absurd), where he discovers that humanity has split into two species—the decorative, helpless Eloi living on the surface, and the brutish, underground Morlocks who feed and clothe them in exchange for something the Eloi have chosen not to think about. Even at his relatively young age, Wells clearly understood where class division, left unaddressed and accelerating, would eventually arrive. He followed the logic of Victorian industrial capitalism eight hundred thousand years forward and didn't like what he found.

Wells wrote at least three distinct versions of the story before the final novel appeared. The earliest version, called The Chronic Argonauts, was published in his college newspaper in 1888, seven years before the book, and is so different in character and tone that it reads almost like a different writer finding his way toward an idea he hadn't fully captured yet. The Time Traveller of the final novel has no name. Wells made that choice deliberately. He is everyman, no man, the reader themselves sitting in that laboratory chair.

Interestingly, Wells wrote The Time Machine while genuinely ill, recovering from a kidney injury that had nearly killed him and would trouble him for years. The novel's elegiac quality—its sense of entropy, of energy running down, of light fading at the end of everything—was written by a young man who had recently had reason to contemplate his own extinction. The novel ends not with triumph or rescue but with the sun dying and the last traces of life flickering out on a frozen beach. Wells looked at the far future and saw silence.

He had just invented science fiction. And he wanted you to know it wasn't going to end well.