The Time Machine

Content Ratings

Mild Romance

The Time Traveller forms a tender protective attachment to an Eloi woman named Weena; the relationship is emotionally warm but culturally alien and not physically romantic in a modern sense.

Moderate Themes

The novel is a sustained allegory about class division and its ultimate social consequences, the indifference of an evolved future to human values, and the philosophical meaninglessness of progress without moral development.

Moderate Violence

The Morlocks attack the Time Traveller and Weena; Weena dies in a fire; the Time Traveller uses violence to fend off attacks; violence is present and has emotional consequences.

Synopsis

An English inventor travels eight hundred thousand years into the future and discovers that humanity has split into two species: the gentle, passive Eloi who live above ground and the subterranean Morlocks who tend the machinery and feed on the Eloi. Returning to retrieve his machine, the Time Traveller comes to a grim understanding of what the class divisions of Victorian England have ultimately produced. A foundational work of science fiction, brief and haunting.