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the Machine to explore time ( The Time Machine ) is a novel of Science-fiction, written in 1895 by H.G. Wells (the United Kingdom). He is regarded as traditional kind on the Voyage in time.

History

London, at the 19th century. In the house of a scientist, a group of friends listens to that which claims to be the first traveller of time to tell his adventures. The traveller of time begins his account by describing the world of year 802701. The Earth is inhabited by the Eloïs, descendants of the men. Androgynes, simpletons and soft, they spend their time to play such of the children and eating fruits in the large garden which became the Earth. On the surface of this one, any more no bad grass remains, nor no other animal specie. The world seems to be become a paradise. Only the explorer of time is not long in realizing that this apparent harmony hiding place a terrible secrecy. Wells bottomless are distributed a little everywhere, and a noise of machine escapes from it. It is under ground which another downward species saw also men, the Morlocks, kinds of white monkeys to the red eyes not supporting more the light through living in the black. The night, they go and come on the surface while passing by the wells, to nourish itself of Eloïs, become their cattle without their knowledge. The explorer, whose machine to travel in time disappeared, will have to go down under ground to face Morlocks, if he wants to be able to turn over at his place. Meanwhile it will bind with Eloïs, Weena, which will end up dying in a fire lit by the explorer to make flee Morlocks.

Stages of its development

This novel is the first of H.G. Wells. The first outline was carried out in 1888, and the last version was finished in 1924. This is why the Machine to explore time with the characteristic to have known several alternatives, published or not.

When it begins the writing from this account, Wells is only 21 years old. This text is written during spring 1888, whereas it is in convalescence in a friend. It is published in a monthly review of its university (the Normal School off Science of South Kensington). Wells is itself one of the cofounders and the editor association of this review entitled the Science Schools Journal . Its text has then as a title The Chronic Argonauts . But the argument is still well far from that of the Machine to explore time . Wells wrote this first account in spring 1888 but the idea of the voyage in time probably came to him on January 14th, 1887, after having assisted with exposed of a student, E.A. Hamilton-Gordon, devoted to the " Fourth Dimension" , exposed which was published thereafter in the pages of the Science Schools Journal , the publication whose, let us recall it, Wells was editor association.

The Chronic Argonauts was published in April, May and June of the same year, but the publication will not continue, this text will remain unfinished. Today, there remains no specimen of this outline of novel, Wells bought all the specimens available to destroy them in order to make disappear any trace from its awkwardnesses of youth. Wells would have written two later versions of this account of which there does not remain any trace, only testimonys which affirm that the second version would resemble of nothing the Machine to explore time , but the third would refer some common.

The two only elements which will remain in the Machine to explore time , are on the one hand the idea of Time like the fourth dimension; and in addition the machine to explore the time, which is called in this first version the Chronic Argo and which will become the the Machine to explore time , giving its title to the new version.

The text will be connected truly with the Machine to explore time only in the first quarter 1894 with the publication in the review National To observe of a new version of its account entitled The Time-Traveller' S Story . In this one “the explorer of the time” (called in this text “Philosophical Inventor” makes with his friends a talk over “Time like the fourth dimension”, then learns how to them the existence from a machine to explore time that it conceived. The following week, he reports to them his adventures in the year 12.203 where he met degenerated descendants of the men (who do not bear a name), like one second race, Morlocks. He ends up returning at his place healthy and except, and discusses the end of planet with his friends. This alternative is the first to present true similarities with the text which one knows.

However, the final version appears in another review, The New Review , it is published from January in May 1895. It is this version, slightly modified, which, the first, appears in book in June 1895 in England. This text considerably was worked over again and enriched. This time, the title of work is The Time Machine: Year Invention . This version is that which was translated in 1895 per Henry D. Davray for the French review the Mercure de France , and which is, today still, the only available one in French.

But Wells wrote a last in 1924 of it, it acts of the version of reference in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Analyzes

the Machine to explore time is partly a satire of the time victorienne and an extrapolation of the social situation of the time.

Like any science fiction novel, work must be replaced in its context.

In spite of its great qualities, the film carried out in 1960 by George Pal (“the Spielberg of the Fifties”) gum rather skilfully the very politicized message of Wells to naive socialism that “other large”, George Orwell, will scoff rather cruelly in 1984 .

Indeed, so much in novels as When the Sleeper wakes up or Récit of the days to come , that in the Machine to explore time , the recurrent theme of a degeneration of humanity on the mode of the capitalist exploitation such as it observed it in England victorienne is re-used by Wells according to a single diagram, influenced by the very new theories darwiniennes on the evolution. The city inhuman of Account of the days to come , with its superstructures and its scrapes-ciels metal of type Eiffel Tower, inhabited by the class higher, and its immense populated underground installations of " prolos" reduced in slavery by the machine will find themselves almost with identical in Métropolis (see will infra), but are pushed until their extreme consequences in the Machine to explore the time where, in a very remote future, the working classes and the idlers who exploit them end up degenerating into two distinct human types: the Elois , descendants of the idlers, hedonists and décérébrés of the " surface" , and the Morlocks , degenerated misadventures of the slaves from now on adapted to their underground habitat. In both cases the cretinisation is quasi total. The decline of civilization is symbolized by the ruin of the sumptuous public edifices and the illiteracy of Elois.

There one sees an echo of what the literary elite of left at the time deplored in this England in full economic advancement: strong social inequalities, increasing mechanization of the big cities, accumulation of the habitat, underground cities, metal architecture, etc the film imagined, for the decorations of the future, a style of very contemporary construction and a decoration for the time, i.e. very “the Sixties”. A greater fidelity with the thought of Wells would have consisted in taking as a starting point buildings such as the Large palace, the cupola of Haussmann Spring or the canopy of the seat of the General society.

The social satire hardly any more has of direction today, but the poetic genius of the one of the founding fathers of the science fiction remains, and with the persistent success of this small novel celebrates it formula could apply: “thousand times imitated, ever equalized”. The strangeness and the total expatriation of the voyage in time are evoked in the Machine to explore time with a talent that only Barjavel will reach forty years later with the imprudent Traveller , which is obviously inspired besides by it.

Parallels

The film Metropolis , of Fritz Lang, takes again the same image of dominant living surface, while the workmen are confined with the depths of the Earth.

Adaptations

1960 : the Machine to explore time ( The Time Machine ) film of George Stake
2002: the Machine to explore time ( The Time Machine ) film of Simon Wells

The most famous film adaptation of the novel of Wells is the film of the same name carried out in 1960 by George Pal. In 2002, the realizer Simon Wells, who is not other than the back grandson of H.G. Wells, will adapt also the novel to the cinema.

A scientist living at the time victorienne manufactures a machine to travel in time and travels far in the future. He realizes whereas the human race was divided into two species, alive on the surface, and the other under ground. When its machine is stolen by the underground people cannibal, it must risk its life to turn over in its time.

See too

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