jeriendhal | Review: The Time Machine, H.G. Welles (spoilers)

Another one of those sci-fi classics that I'd never gotten around reading until now. It's about wheat we'd consider novella length these days, which is all right since the plot is a fairly thin travelogue of the nameless Time Traveler arriving back to a regale his rather startled dinner guests with his adventures in the year 803k.

Like most people I knew the story already, about how mankind is divided between the Eloi and the Morlocks, with one using the other for cattle, if only from George Pal's famous adaptation. Less well known was the Upper Class/Laborer division that Welles discusses, keeping in line with his Socialist politics. Also less well known are what the Eloi are really like. Weena, the Eloi that the Time Traveler befriends, is not a pretty, adult (but brainless) human, but rather a small, childlike creature along the lines of

chaypeta's ferin. More shocking was her fate in the book, when she's lost and apparently killed while her and the Time Traveler are caught in a Morlock ambush.

Recommended.