The Time Machine

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.