The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Traveller, a dreamer obsessed with traveling through time, builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future. He lands in the year 802701: the world has been transformed by a society living in apparent harmony and bliss, but as the Traveler stays in the future he discovers a hidden barbaric and depraved subterranean class. Wells's transparent commentary on the capitalist society was an instant bestseller and launched the time-travel genre.

This is the tale of the Time Traveller as re-told by the unnamed first person narrator. It's is an easy read with lovely language which paints pictures in your mind (however, my ongoing image of the Time Machine as some kind of mutated Harley Davidson is not entirely true to Wells' words).
Much of the Time Traveller's adventure is set in the year 802,701 AD where humanity has evolved into the childlike surface-dwelling Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks. Initially the Time Traveller assumes these underground engineers have evolved from the working class to serve the gentry- derived Eloi. However, the truth appears to be darker as the innocent, fruitarian Eloi are the fattened calves for the Morlocks. Is this a warning of how machinery will make intelligence obsolete? An example of the horrors underpinning a seemingly utopian life?
This is not a book to give you hope for the future of humanity despite the climactic phrase “even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man”. In Wells' 802,701 humanity may have actually devolved, intellectually inferior to the late Victorian protagonist. Further forwards in time the Earth itself has reverted to a form of prehistoric nightmare bereft of cognizant life.
It offers no security or answers, we will never know where the Time Traveller has ended up. However, despite its dark depictions it is actually a very enjoyable and entertaining adventure story which I encourage everyone to read.

This is a foundational work in the science fiction genre. It expresses topics of progress, human identity, politics, and decay. Progress is not inevitable and the future is not guaranteed to be positive.

The Time Traveler goes to the year 802,701 and finds two species that have split off from the current human race, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi, descendants of the elite, seem to live in an idyllic garden, but the Traveler soon learns about the relationship between the Eloi and the underground dwellers, the Morlocks who are the descendants of the working poor. It is a relationship of farmer to livestock. The farmer is the Morlocks and the livestock is the Eloi. Society has flipped.

The Traveler has many misadventures. One of which is setting a large forest fire as a means of escaping the Morlocks. The Traveler eventually returns to his home time and tells his story to his companions.

This novella is quite enjoyable. Lessons can be learned from this work.