The Time Machine

A scientist known only as the Time Traveller tells his dinner guests how he has journeyed to the year 802,701. He finds a world of gentle, childlike Eloi living in ruined palaces, apparently without work or care, and below the ground the pale, ape-like Morlocks who tend the machines, and feed on the Eloi. When the Morlocks steal his machine he must win it back to escape; then he travels further still, to a dying earth under a huge red sun.

H. G. Wells published this short novel in 1895, carrying his worries about class and evolution into the far future, and it gave the time machine to fiction. Mark Nelson reads it alone, in under four hours.