The Time Machine

A Victorian scientist builds a machine that carries him hundreds of thousands of years into the future, where he discovers that humanity has split into two species—the gentle, childlike Eloi who live in idle comfort above ground, and the brutish, subterranean Morlocks who prey upon them. Journeying even further, he witnesses the dying of the Earth beneath a swollen red sun. Wells’s short, brilliant novel invented the modern time-travel story and used it to deliver a chilling vision of class division carried to its evolutionary extreme. Imaginative, haunting, and profound, The Time Machine is a founding masterpiece of science fiction whose ideas and imagery still shape the genre today.