The Time Machine

A Victorian inventor, known only as the Time Traveller, tells his dinner guests how he travelled to the year 802,701. He found a beautiful, decaying world of gardens and ruined palaces, peopled by the Eloi, gentle, childlike creatures who do no work. But his machine disappears, and searching for it he discovers the Morlocks, pale beings who live in tunnels underground, tend the old machines and come up at night to feed. With his friend Weena, he fights his way back to the machine and flees further into the future, to a dying Earth under a huge red sun.

H. G. Wells published this, his first novel, in 1895, and it gave the world the idea of a machine for travelling in time. Its future is a warning drawn from the present: the idle rich and the underground workers of Victorian England have become two species. Wells's next great 'scientific romance' was The War of the Worlds.

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.

He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.