The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A classic novel that should not be missed. Though very late in reading this book, I am totally overwhelmed by the foresight of this great author, in future of mankind and the earth itself.

Storyline: An inventor of The Time Machine (name undisclosed) gathers a group of learned people from different strata of the society in his house, to explain about his great invention that can take a man into future and past. The Time Traveller (as named by the author) tries to explain that there is a fourth dimension to length, width and height of Space, and that is ‘time’. Just like how we can move forward and backward in the three common parameters, he wants to prove that we can do so similarly in time also, which is conveniently ignored by the scientists. He puts himself practically into the Time Machine and moves ahead thousands of years into the future. There, to his surprise he doesn’t find advanced life as expected but tiny human beings who evolved into terrestrial and subterranean creatures, the former being purely vegetarian and the later non-vegetarian. It’s a world of the haves and the have-nots with totally different languages, life style, eating habits etc. A sort of a stage where mankind has evolved into a very simple and secure life with no desires, wants, needs, familial structure, male female differences, violence, intellectual/economic power, big buildings, cars, luxuries, machines, tools, gadgets etc but a simple of eating just fruits and meat to live and enjoy a totally different pristine mother nature, where even fire is unknown. All forms of animal lives have become extinct including all forms of bacteria, viruses and other microscopic organisms. The time traveler escapes the cannibalistic subterraneans to travel much further into future only to find that practically all life on earth has disappeared except for a few crustaceans of the sea. Even the sun is about to collapse and earth has turned totally barren with no day and night. This depresses the time traveler to a great extent and returns back to the present only to tell what he witnessed to the group. But they do not believe in him and dismiss the narration as a silly dream as he doesn’t have any physical proofs of his visit.
Determined to prove the authenticity of his machine, the Traveller goes back in his Time Machine this time with a camera to prove his visit to the past or future but doesn’t return back.

Positives: Fiction re-defined. A classic, which cannot be admired in mortal words. Some great truths about human life and its evolution to a level where there is no desire, danger and fear, is exquisitely explained. The reader will not want to put down the book until finished at one go. A wonderful book of unfathomable imagination which enlightens the reader beyond a level of one’s thirst for knowledge of human existence and its evolution into the future that brings it back to the beginning where it all started.

Negatives: The book could take us through the extreme future of the mankind but not about how the evolution happened stage by stage.

My rating is 5 out of 5


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