- Published: 15 April 2017
- ISBN: 9780525432357
- Imprint: Knopf US
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 96
- RRP: $32.00
The Time Machine











An ever-popular novel about the future of the human race from the founding father of science fiction. VINTAGE CLASSICS.
The first great novel to imagine time travel, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) follows its narrator on an incredible journey that takes him eventually to the earth’s last moments. When a Victorian scientist invents a machine that allows him to travel to the year A.D. 802,701, he encounters a highly evolved society of people called Eloi, for whom suffering has apparently been replaced by refinement and harmony. First impressions are misleading, however, and his discovery of the Eloi’s true relationship to the brutish Morlocks who lurk in tunnels beneath them leads him to a horrifying insight into the fate of mankind and its roots in his own time.
- Published: 15 April 2017
- ISBN: 9780525432357
- Imprint: Knopf US
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 96
- RRP: $32.00
Other books in the series
About the author
H. G. Wells, the third son of a small shopkeeper, was born in Bromley in 1866. After two years' apprenticeship in a draper's shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories and programmes for world regeneration.
Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. His prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress, whose anticipations of a future world state include The Shape of Things to Come (1933). His controversial views on sexual equality and women's rights were expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, 'an important liberator of thought and action'.
Wells drew on his own early struggles in many of his best novels, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). His educational works, some written in collaboration, include The Outline of History (1920) and The Science of Life (1930). His Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., 1934) reviews his world. He died in London in 1946.