The Time Machine

A Victorian scientist known only as the Time Traveller invents a machine that can carry him through the fourth dimension, and hurls himself hundreds of thousands of years into the future. He arrives in the year 802,701 A.D. to find humanity apparently divided into the Eloi — beautiful, gentle, childlike creatures who live in idle comfort above ground — in what first appears to be a peaceful paradise.

But the paradise conceals a horror. Beneath the surface dwell the Morlocks, pale, ape-like beings who tend the machinery of this world and emerge in darkness to prey on the Eloi. As the Time Traveller loses his machine and races to recover it, he pieces together a grim theory of how the human race split into two species — and glimpses, further still, the dying Earth beneath a swollen red sun.

First published in 1895, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine effectively invented the time-travel novel and gave science fiction one of its most enduring images. Compact and haunting, it is both a thrilling adventure and a dark parable about class division, evolution, and the ultimate fate of humankind.