The Time Machine

Imagine a smart inventor who builds a special bike-like machine that lets him zoom through time like a super-fast bicycle on the road of years! He goes way into the future to the year 802,701 and finds tiny, happy people called Eloi living in a pretty but broken world like a giant playground gone wild. But scary monsters called Morlocks hide underground and eat the Eloi at night—yikes! He saves a sweet Eloi girl named Weena, but loses his machine and barely gets home to tell his friends the spooky story of how people might split into weak fun-lovers and sneaky hunters if we don't watch out.

H.G. Wells' 'The Time Machine' (1895) follows an unnamed Victorian scientist, dubbed the Time Traveller, who invents a machine enabling instantaneous travel through time. At a dinner party in Richmond, England, he demonstrates his theory of the fourth dimension before vanishing into the future, returning disheveled to recount his harrowing odyssey. Journeying to the year 802,701 AD, he discovers a bifurcated humanity: the childlike, hedonistic Eloi inhabiting a seemingly utopian surface world of overgrown ruins, and the subterranean, ape-like Morlocks who sustain the Eloi through cannibalistic predation, embodying a devolved working class risen against their idle overlords. Further voyages reveal an even bleaker entropic decay, with humanity extinct and Earth dominated by crimson beaches and giant crabs, underscoring Wells' Darwinian pessimism. The narrative, framed by a skeptical audience, critiques late-19th-century imperialism, class stratification, and unchecked technological progress. The Time Traveller's brief romance with the Eloi girl Weena humanizes his terror, yet his ultimate loss of the machine and resolve to return amplifies themes of hubris and inevitability. Wells masterfully blends adventure with speculative sociology, pioneering the time-travel genre and influencing countless dystopian visions.