The Time Machine Explained: Eloi, Morlocks and the End

In 1895 a young English writer published a short novel about a man who builds a machine to travel through time. H. G. Wells's The Time Machine gave the language the phrase time machine, and it set the pattern for a century of stories about travelling into the future.

It is also much darker than its reputation. The future the traveller finds is not a world of wonders but a warning, and the book ends somewhere few adventure stories dare to go. Here is what happens, and what it means.

The young Wells

Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent, into a family with little money. He won a place at the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, the great defender of Darwin's theory of evolution.

That education is all over the book. The Time Machine is a story about evolution and about class, written by a socialist who had seen poverty up close. It grew out of an earlier story, The Chronic Argonauts, from 1888, and was serialised in the New Review before Heinemann published it as a book in 1895.

A story told at dinner

The novel is framed as a story told to a group of guests at a dinner party. The main character is known only as the Time Traveller; he never gets a name. A narrator among the guests records what the Traveller tells them on his return, dishevelled and limping, from his journey.

The frame lets Wells play with doubt. The guests, and the reader, are never sure whether to believe him, and the Traveller offers only one small piece of evidence, which turns out to be important at the very end.

The year 802,701

The Traveller arrives in the year 802,701 and finds what looks at first like paradise. Small, gentle, childlike people called the Eloi live in a garden landscape among ruined buildings, eating fruit, playing and doing no work at all. Nearby stands a huge white statue of a sphinx.

His machine vanishes, and he soon discovers why. Beneath the surface live the Morlocks, pale, ape-like creatures who shun the light and work machinery underground. They have hidden his machine inside the sphinx, and, it emerges, they come up at night to feed on the Eloi.

What the Eloi and Morlocks mean

The Traveller works out the explanation slowly. The Eloi are descended from the leisured upper classes, the Morlocks from the working classes who laboured underground. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the divide between rich and poor has become a divide between species.

It is a savage piece of social criticism. The comfortable classes, freed from all struggle, have lost their intelligence and strength; the workers, kept out of sight, have become monsters who prey on them. Wells, a member of the socialist Fabian Society, was warning his readers about where their society was heading.

Weena

The Traveller saves an Eloi woman named Weena from drowning, and she becomes his companion, the only real relationship in the book. She gives him flowers, which he keeps in his pocket.

Weena is lost during a night of fire and Morlock attacks in a forest, and the Traveller never finds out what happened to her. It is the emotional centre of the novel, and the flowers she gave him become his only proof of the journey.

The end of the world

After recovering his machine, the Traveller flees further forward, and the book's most famous passage follows. Millions of years ahead, he finds a dying Earth: red beaches under a huge, dim sun, crab-like creatures crawling on the shore. About thirty million years on, the world is cold and almost silent.

Nothing in the book is more frightening than this, and there are no villains in it. Wells drew on the science of his time, which held that the sun would slowly burn out, to show that humanity and everything it valued would one day be gone. It is one of the first great images of deep time in fiction.

An ending without an answer

The Traveller returns to tell his story, with two strange white flowers from Weena as evidence. The next day he sets off on another journey, with a camera this time. He never comes back. The narrator, three years later, is still waiting.

The book ends with the narrator holding on to the two flowers, a reminder that gratitude and tenderness survived even in that broken future. It is a small, human ending to a story about the end of everything.

Why it still matters

Wells went on to write The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds within three years, and he is often called a father of science fiction, a title he shares with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. The Time Machine came first, and it was filmed many times, most famously in 1960 by George Pal.

It is short enough to read in an evening. For more early science fiction, try Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or see where time travel sits among the genre's other regions in our reader's map of science fiction.