May 08, 2003 12:59 AM
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(Updated May 08, 2003 01:21 AM)
My rather limited initiation into the world science fiction lasted about a dozen books spanning HG Wells, Mary Shelley and Isaac Asimov. Looking back, I always feel that my severe mental inadequacies in the field of science have robbed me of a wonderful opportunity to fully explore this wonderful subject and to venture on some zany dreams myself.
Be that as it may, the first ever book that I read on sci-fi was “The Time Machine” by HG Wells 15 years ago in my 8th class. Always the student of convenience that I was, I picked up this book from our hostel library only because my normal stock of Alistair Maclean and Louis L’amour books were being picked like hot cakes off the shelves by my friends. Not really left with any choice, I picked up this small book (it was less than 100 pages) as it had no takers.
The Story
The book was written by HG Wells in 1895 (he was just 29 then) at a time when people often whimsically wondered about the rapid progress science was making and how it would affect the future of mankind.
The book starts off with the “Time Traveler” (there are no names for the main characters, they are just addressed by their professions) speaking to a group of friends at a party about his amazing invention – a machine that is capable of taking him hundreds of thousands of years into the past or future. The basis for the story is the proven fact that man has developed the appropriate technologies to travel through three of the four known dimensions (length, width and height). Wells argues that with some amount of scientific serendipity, man would also be able to travel through the fourth dimension, time.
The Time Traveler invites his friends over for dinner and as they wait for him, he comes back after some time in a disheveled state. He goes on to tell them that as they waited for him, he took off in his time machine some 8,00,000 years (!) into the future and then narrates the experiences of his time travels.
Contrary to expectations where he hopes to see a highly scientifically developed society, he is shocked to see the future societal structure split into two different strata – “The Eloi”, a race of people who are mild-mannered, vegetarian eating and almost sexless, and “The Morlocks” a deadly species with beastly appearances who prey on the Eloi.
He becomes very friendly with The Eloi who readily accept him as a friend but is shocked to find one fine day that his Time Machines has been stolen. The quest for his path-breaking invention leads him deep into the bowels of the earth into the realm of the Morlocks where he faces terrible dangers before finally getting away with his precious invention.
Thus Spake TiC
This was certainly one different novel that I have ever read. For one thing, there is no such thing as characterization and stranger still, the main characters don’t even have names! That, however is quite understandable because the actual hero of the book is the fourth dimension – “Time”, and man’s efforts to manipulate it by traveling back and forth through it.
The book itself is rather dry, totally devoid of any humour and quite unlike his more majestic works to emerge later like “The Invisible Man” and “The War of The Worlds”. Behind all the sci-fi theory pounding lies a subtle under lying reference to the social norms of those years – the emerging of “The Bourgeois” and “The Proletariats”. In a way, it is also a tribute to Wells that he could clearly discern, a good 2-3 decades before, the imminent conflict between these two sections.
Despite not being a seminary work on the concept of time travel, it surely ranks among the foremost works in this field and perhaps even ranks better than most of its later day inspirations by other authors. What probably made the scientific community of that time to sit up and seriously take notice of Wells ideas was the fact that he effectively proved that man could actually travel in time through mechanical means rather than the comic-book supernatural means.
The book raises a good many questions about the past and present, both of which are yet to be experienced in the current age. I found Wells suggestion rather shocking that some thousands of years into the future, man would actually be leading a Spartan life without any trappings of scientific technology or advancements and worse still, the demarcation in the society and the natural hatred nurtured by the working class against the elite upper crest still continues.
Truly, a ground-breaking book that continues to befuddle the best of scientists even to this day.
Once again, Samir’s (Samsat) terrific review on “The Invisible Man” and Vivek’s eagerness for “I wanna read more” has inspired me to write this review. My sincere thanks to both of them.
