Review: "The Time Machine"

[x_los]

I finally read The Time Machine, and while Wells does an admirable job framing the epistemological limits of his narrator’s view-point to cover the story’s ass (I mean that seriously, this move is well-executed), there is something inherently wonky about the core supposition that increasing ease will lead to racial decay: as voiced by a posh narrator from an intensely inwardly-stratified and outwardly-colonial society whose own relative indolence has enabled him to build a fucking time machine? Like. Do you get, what a weird claim that is, Wells? There’s a discrete socialist assertion about the role class-division plays in this possible future of humanity, but that stands kind of outside Wells’ core idea about what freedom from want will do to people—which relies on a reader believing that humanity wouldn’t find fresh sources of interest and challenge (as it always has before, but go off I guess). 

 

- I can’t tell if Wells writes like Arthur Machen or if they just have same region/era-its.

- “I’m too occidental to sit idle”: Wells. Shut up.

- Me: Oh, it seems it’s time for a weird comment about black people from your pal HGiggles. The real time machine is the incidental racism we found along the way.

Ana: “If only I had a time machine,” sighed Herbert George, “so I could find future racisms to bring back. To say nothing of the racisms of the past!!”

- “I am here to tell you of a horror beyond your comprehension: a large crab.”

Comments

[kolleh]

Yeah, I wasn't remotely impressed by The Time Machine when I read it. It's a bit fun as an adventure/mystery, but, you know, we have an awful lot of those now without the prevalent racism and bad takes on leisure.

[x_los]

It is kind of frustrating that if it’s a Novel of Ideas, the ideas are under-worked.