How Would You Use The Machine in the Story?

[Katie]

Re-reading the Time Machine, I have found it a particularly poignant book to read when we are quarantined due to mass illness.

I feel a common answer would be related to the current pandemic, but instead of commenting solely on that, how would you use the machine to have an adventure? Would you go back and visit someone? Or maybe you would go forward?

I feel I might fall into similar patterns that befall the characters in the book. After learning how the machine operates, I might travel to a time I have never seen, see the decades of the world I have only seen in a textbook.

[Nick J]

That's the question Wells leaves us with in his epilogue: Where would you go? Backward to "the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone" or "forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved?" Stephen Baxter's excellent 1995 official sequel has the Traveller doing both, of course.

The filmic versions are a little less helpful on this matter. In Wells' great grandson's 2002 version, the Traveller purposely strands himself in the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd to be with the female Eloi, Meena. George Pal can't help tempering Wells' open ending either, in his 1960 version, though he is more faithful to the original. Filby is left to presume that "George" (Pal's name for the Traveller) goes forward to be with Meena again, leaving us only to wonder which three books he took with him.

But the question is when would I go. I might be tempted by the year zero, to find out the truth of the New Testament stories, as in Michael Moorcock's 1969 Behold the Man. I might also be inclined forward to the age when the riddles of our own time are answered and solved. But that future might not be as attractive as it first appears, as Wells himself warns in his 1899 The Sleeper Awakes (redrafted in 1910 as When the Sleeper Wakes). And what if you end up in a future you didn't expect, like in Ronald Wright's 1997 A Scientific Romance, wherein the protagonist finds Wells' time machine and uses it to go forward 500 years to find an empty flooded world with a blindingly hot sun. What if for some reason you couldn't get home?..

I suppose the sensible thing would be to take a bit of a look around, 1066, 1890, 2100 etc, see what you like the look of and try a stop over or two. Overall, however, I think the late 1960s would be my target era. Specifically Swinging London. Austin Powers aside, I just think that would be a fun era to be alive, and knowing the pitfalls and potentialities by means of a pre-travel historic review would be comforting. You could even take a sports almanac back with you and live off gambling winnings, as suggested in the first Back to the Future sequel. Also, I'd love to see the early Pink Floyd playing the UFO club with Syd Barrett. And if the time machine ran out of crystal power, I'd have the 70s and 80s to look forward to... Not so bad really.