H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, his first novel. A Victorian scientist, referred to throughout only as the Time Traveller, constructs a machine capable of moving through time and travels approximately 800,000 years into the future. He finds a seemingly pleasant world populated by the beautiful, gentle Eloi, who live in decaying palaces and appear to do nothing productive. Underground, he discovers the Morlocks, pallid, ape-like creatures who maintain machinery in the dark and periodically emerge at night to harvest the Eloi as food. The Time Traveller eventually understands that the Eloi and Morlocks are the diverged descendants of the Victorian upper and working classes, separated over millennia by the conditions their society created.
Wells's specific target was the social Darwinist argument that the prosperity of the Victorian upper class was evidence of biological fitness. His inversion, that the degeneration of both classes follows logically from the class structure of his own time, with the idle rich losing their capacity for self-reliance and the exploited workers losing their capacity for anything except mechanical labor, was a Marxist-inflected critique delivered through genre fiction. The Time Traveller's eventual journey to the far future, where the sun is dying and the last forms of life are simple crustaceans on a darkening beach, extends the social argument into cosmology: human civilization is not the endpoint of evolution but a moment in a process whose scale dwarfs any human concern.
The Time Machine works both as social satire and as early science fiction in a more focused way than many of Wells's subsequent novels. The image of the Eloi and Morlocks has entered the cultural vocabulary as a shorthand for class division carried to its logical extreme, which means most readers now encounter it through references before they read the source. The novel's final section, the dying earth sequence, is what separates it from simple political allegory and gives it a bleaker, stranger quality that Wells's socialist commitments alone would not have produced.
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams sold only 351 copies in its first six years after publication.
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