To celebrate 50 years of Science Fiction and Fantasy publishing, Gollancz gave their readers the chance to select 10 of its titles that would be republished in bright yellow hardbacks adorned with a purple block capital typeface.

One book on the list is H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). Sci-Fi fans won’t be shocked—this book is a classic of the Science Fiction canon and its influence can be seen throughout the genre’s history. It has been adapted to radio, television and film, and many contemporary writers speak of its influence. In a way The Time Machine is so deeply embedded within the vocabulary of Science Fiction that it’s easy to forget precisely why we consider it such an important work. Gollancz’s anniversary edition offers the ideal opportunity to remind ourselves.

At the dawn of the 20th century, a group of friends comprised of writers, academics and scientists, discuss the principles of time and space during a dinner party. One member of the group presents a radical idea of time that has astonishing consequences—time travel. The Time Traveller, as the narrator calls him, is not merely a theorist and has even built a machine that will allow its user to “move in Time”. Most of the story is an account of the Time Traveller’s adventure to the year 802,701 AD, in which the earth is a mysterious environment and the human race-or races in this instance-has dramatically changed.

The idea of time travel might not seem like such a big deal to modern readers—audiences have been spoiled by years of Doctor Who. And while the birth of the idea can be tracked to the Sanskrit epics of ancient India, there wouldn’t have been a Tardis without The Time Machine as Stephen Baxter points out in his introduction to this edition. Wells popularised the idea of using or building a machine with which to explore time, so we have him to thank for Hollywood’s seemingly endless number of feel-good films that use this as a plot device.

What makes The Time Machine so compelling, isn’t simply to do with its intriguing ideas, but the way they’re explored. Wells’ tale evinces the drama embedded within the scientific method and the excitement and risk of treading on snow that nobody else has touched:

The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered; I was, so to speak, attentuated – was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction – possibly a far-reaching explosion – would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions – in the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk – one of the risks a man has got to take!

It is easy to imagine similar levels of excitement during the early 20th century meetings of superstar physicists who were about to radically change mankind’s understanding of the universe with quantum mechanics, or even more recently, in the corridors of CERN when an experiment showed that neutrinos travel faster than light, therefore undermining a pillar of the Standard Model of physics and paving the way to crazy new possibilities, like, say, time travel.

The ability to travel in time presents the ideal opportunity to explore another of humanity’s obsessions and that is to speculate about the future of the earth and more specifically the fate of our species. Wells propels the Time Traveller and the reader into the distant future, but any hope that the earth is populated by uber-advanced humans who run around hitting things with light sabres is swiftly dashed, when the Time Traveller encounters what appears to be the future’s dominant lifeform; a childlike race of creatures, the Eloi, whom appear to live in a form of communitarian bliss. However, the Time Traveller’s ideas about them and the world they inhabit soon unravel when he encounters the subterranean Morlocks, leading leads him to a more sinister conclusion about humanity’s fate.

A century since its first publishing and The Time Machine certainly retains a provocative energy; a characteristic that may have even increased over the years. The is a short book, but it is packed with big ideas. Critics have written in detail about Wells’ most likely political subtext and it isn’t difficult to spot the master/slave narrative in the division between the Eloi and Morlock. There is clear pessimism in Wells’ vision of humanity’s progress-modernity and all its elements-taken to its logical conclusion. And while there might be some hope found in the Eloi’s compassion-the pervasiveness of the human spirit-the picture is somewhat bleak.

However, it occurred to me while reading the book in recent weeks that the most striking element of the narrative isn’t so much this dystopian vision, but rather that the vision is characterised by a break-up of the human species. Those who’re familiar with the brain builders (i.e. artificial intelligence) like Hugo De Garis will know that the issue of species dominance, they argue, will be the 21st century’s central narrative brought about as humans upgrade themselves with technology. And this isn’t far from what Wells depicts in his future earth, in the sense that the current state of play shouldn’t simply be taken as a given.

Considered in the light of the limitless despair at the current state of the world economy, what’s noticeable in its absence is the consideration that the way the world fundamentally operates at present, i.e. market capitalism, will never change and if it did the world would probably end. This is the best we’ve got and will ever have and we simply have to do whatever it takes to fix it, because there is no other way.

The Time Machine is a tonic for our 21st century-centric outlook by highlighting the insignificance of modern human civilisation within the scheme of cosmic time—we haven’t always been here and the chances are we (at least in our current form) won’t be here in the distant future. And if we are, whatever ‘we’ means, there are no guarantees that ‘we’ will necessarily be in charge.

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