Audiobook: The Time Machine

I have a meditation app that reads soft stories as a way for people to fall asleep. They don't put me to sleep but they do relax me so on the way home from work, I listened to one. It was the first two chapters to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. I knew it was a classic novel but had never known the full story. The first two chapters were intriguing so I wanted to hear the rest. With a lot of driving necessary, I decided to download and listen to the full audiobook. I finished the book the next day.

Written in 1895, this novel can still stand as a work of science fiction. It seems like most science fiction has to do with space travel and aliens, yet this story remains on Earth. Additionally it is set much, much further into the future than contemporary science fiction. In this future, Earth is very alien indeed. However, much like contemporary science fiction, The Time Machine is an allegory about society.

In order to achieve a lasting Utopia, the human species split, fracturing society between the haves and have-nots. Each living in lasting harmony until life became unbalanced as it always does. At this point humans degenerated into two unique breeds, both of lower intellect than modern man. Having conquered nature, these species no longer needed the intelligence humans rely on today and these species became blissful imbeciles with their own problems. H.G. Wells continues the story to the last days of the Earth where man himself, and all intelligent life forms have been forgotten where the Earth has ceased to rotate. It is a significantly different version of the future compared to other well-known science fiction stories.

I haven't quoted a book so far, but I had to hear the final line of the epilogue several times:

But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

The flowers were a simple gift to the time traveler who had brought them back in his pocket to Victorian England. Though humans of the future became simple or ugly, their morality endured. The human heart bearing compassion and gratitude, born millennia ago, persisted thousands of centuries into the future.