The Time Machine

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure, comfort, and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers. At a Victorian dinner party in Richmond, London, the Time Traveller returns to tell his extraordinary tale of mankind's future in the year 802,701 AD. It is a dystopian vision of Darwinian evolution, with humans split into an above-ground species of Eloi and their troglodyte brothers. The first book H. G. Wells published, The Time Machine, is a scientific romance that helped invent the genre of science fiction and the time travel story. Even before its serialization had finished in the spring of 1895, Wells had been declared a man of genius, and the book heralded a fifty-year career of a major cultural and political controversialist. It is a sardonic rejection of Victorian ideals of progress and improvement and a detailed satirical commentary.