This is a classic now, so I expected it to be the prototype of all time-traveling stories that are so much more common to us now. What I didn’t expect was how serious Wells was about writing the book. The year 80K AD is a unique living breathing world which is built on the gradual conditioning of the two divisions of society: lower class and upper class. This makes the novel much more grounded and a commentary to the present times as all classic science-fiction does and indeed what is basically H.G. Wells’ flavour.

Another surprising thing was the fact that this is also a very imaginative and creative novel. It seems like H.G. Wells is giving voice to the way time-lapse videos work when his protagonist gets on the machine for the first time and he experiences this:

The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still.

I mean, this is before television, cameras, montages and yet HG Wells’ proves himself as the classic visionary writer. The novel is always beautiful and imaginative with it’s setting and the visual language gives the more serious commentary an adventurous thrill and excitement that makes you intrigued in the story.

To me the novel has less merit as a commentary though because it is much more speculative even in it’s own narrative, the chains that keep the two classes in constant struggles are visible clearly at first to the time traveler but he soon realizes that even that simple explanation though it may explain how the beings of 80K AD got it, what is happening to them now is different. The novel also talks about evolution and time and all of that has a more compelling story-telling intrigue than anything that is real.

I have watched the movie “Things to Come” which was based on one of his stories and it felt like the writing and message was very heavy-handed and dry in it and that gave me the impression of Wells’ as a very “old” writer so it was a pleasant surprise to find thrills, danger, beauty and genuine questions of humanity’s future and about the Earth.

8/10 Wonderful read, surprisingly good