SM Book Club- H.G. Wells The Time Machine

@duane "neither the arts and philosophy or science and technology could exist by themselves and that concentration on either one was a dead end over the long run."
Good point! Actually, the more I think of it the more I am convinced this might have been his main point... And, I think that could definitely be defended strongly throughout the book. BTW, really good write up!

@DKR ""Eloi Eloi lema sabachthani?": "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
No, not God like but have they not been forsaken for as you point out they are mindless cattle now? Good point! I never would have even thought to looked for the connection. I wonder if Wells was a religious man?

"Wells would have been familiar with many different stripes of communal thought."
I think this is a given since the Elio lived in this manner

@UncleMorgan "I'd like to propose a title for another Book Review. The book is The Lost Continent, by C. J. Cutliffe Hyne."
Great! I obviously have heard of it but I don't think I have ever read it! Buying it now...

EDIT: There are two eBooks available. The first is $4.00 (annotated) and the second is $3.00 and is just the straight book...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F4F1PC8/?tag=survivalmonke-20

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TYMG64/?tag=survivalmonke-20

 

@DKR Oh, I saw him immediately as an eccentric scientist! One, who was more concerned with the outcome of his machine and proving his theory than with his basic needs for survival of the journey. So, is an eccentric also a fool? I suppose in this case, the answer is definitely - yes.

"Had he become dinner for the Morlocks?"
I considered that to be a very nice touch at the end, leaving the reader in doubt, the possibilities being endless.

 

And yet, despite barely escaping with his life, he still fails to prepare. In the second trip - a Vickers may have been of more use...

Does the TT have a death wish? So bored with the life he has in Olde England that death is a better choice? Most folks just take up drinking....

 

Was HG Wells a practicing Christian?

Wells was a devout Christian - until he hit college. Then, things changed - this is not something normally brought up in discussions of Wells owing to the odious nature of the Eugenics. I poked this dog (Eugenics) pretty hard in my book A Man Out of Place.

After being exposed to Darwinism in school, H.G. Wells converted from devout Christian to devout Darwinist and spent the rest of his life proselytizing for Darwin and eugenics.

Wells advocated a level of eugenics that was even more extreme than Hitler’s. The weak should be killed by the strong, having ‘no pity and less benevolence’. The diseased, deformed and insane, together with ‘those swarms of blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people … will have to go’ in order to create a scientific utopia. He envisioned a time when all crime would be punished by death because ‘People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of it.’

He (Wells) was hailed as an ‘apostle of optimism’ but died an ‘infinitely frustrated’ and broken man, concluding that ‘mankind was ultimately doomed and that its prospect is not salvation, but extinction. Despite all the hopes in science, the end must be “darkness still”.’ Wells’ life abundantly illustrates the bankruptcy of consistently applied Darwinism.

More here - H.G. Wells: Darwin’s Disciple and Eugenicist Extraordinaire


Kemp, P., H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape; Biological Themes and Imaginative Obsessions, The Macmillan Press Ltd., London, p. 14, 1982. - This reviewer calls The Time Machine a ‘blend of Marx and Darwin.. Although - oddly - iTTM doesn't seem to show Marxism as having any redeeming features...

The SciFi field - at least the 'professional' writers/editors for the most part lean from Left to Extremely far Left. One need only look at the last Hugo Awards battles to see the switch to extreme Left. This is one reason so-called Conservative SciFi is almost non-existent.

 

This is one thing that the movies (all of them) changed. If one had only watched the movies - you would believe that TT had taken his machine back to before his loss of Weena - and would attempt to re-ignite Humanity. Utter balderdash, of course.

Story line of IMDb (1960 ver)
On January 5, 1900, a disheveled looking H.G. Wells - George to his friends - arrives late to his own dinner party. He tells his guests of his travels in his time machine, the work about which his friends knew. They were also unbelieving, and skeptical of any practical use if it did indeed work. George knew that his machine was stationary in geographic position, but he did not account for changes in what happens over time to that location. He also learns that the machine is not impervious and he is not immune to those who do not understand him or the machine's purpose. George tells his friends that he did not find the Utopian society he so wished had developed. He mentions specifically a civilization several thousand years into the future which consists of the subterranean morlocks and the surface dwelling eloi, who on first glance lead a carefree life. Despite all these issues, love can still bloom over the spread of millennia.

or
(2002 ver)
Alexander Hartdegen is a scientist and a inventor, who is determined to prove that time travel is possible. When the girl he loves is tragically killed, Alexander is determined to go back in time and change the path. Testing his theories, the time machine is hurtled 800,000 years into the future. He he discovers a terrifying new world. Instead of mankind being the hunter, they are now the hunted, with him stuck in the middle.

Based on the book in as much as there is a Time Machine,,,,not much else matches...

 

By-the-by, when is the next Book Review and shall we go with @UncleMorgan suggestion "The Lost Continent"?
I purchased the book but will hold off reading it if it will be a month or so before we Review it...
@Motomom34 Are you the Task Master for the Book Review and what say you?

 

The book may not yield a good discussion

The novel uses the common nineteenth-century device of a "framing story" to set its narrative in context and augment its believability. The story proper was written supposedly by Deucalion, a warrior-priest of ancient Atlantis; the text having been partly destroyed inadvertently by one of its discoverers at the time of its finding, it is not entirely complete. Deucalion's account describes his heroic but ultimately doomed battle to save Atlantis from destruction by its avaricious and selfish empress, Phorenice.

The story is considered one of the best of that genre.

 

In one of the movies, he returns to the future with the intent to change it and the movie ends with the guests inspecting his library where several books, might have been three, are missing and leaving the viewer with the concept of "which" three books would you take with you that could restore the future. That and some of the Morlock scenes have little to do with the original book, but until I reread it, I was convinced that it had been in the original. Often movies are "modernized and we end up remembering the embellishments and not the original story.
Well's had some very good early books and in some senses, his and Verne books still aren't dated as the science is more of a back story, and the basic plot overcomes the scientific failings.

 

@DKR "The book may not yield a good discussion."
And, it's this 'framing story' why you think it might not yield good discussion?

 

In the Case of TTM, Wells was making a point (or several) on Brit Society of the time - the Haves vs Have-nots, Upper and Lower classes may wind up, literally, eating each other and so on.

He made detours on the nature of Man and Evolution - Wells was quite the supporter of Darwin, and it shows strongly in this book.

As part of the whole package, he lampoons several classical 'types' The Merchant, The Politician and so on.

Not having read the tales of an Ancient Warrior vs a Princess, I don't know that any kind of commentary was made. I could not find anything - let alone writings approaching the volume of discussion on TTM, either as review/comment or in Scholastic writing about the 'message' many believe Wells was sending to his readers....

It would be a fun read for 'Space Opera" aspect. no doubt. TLC is considered on of the best in that genre.

 

Characters not seen....

The invisible ones. Wells makes the case for Evolution and of Upper and Lower classes - yet in the scenes at the TT home - who do we not see?

A. The hired help - ie, the Lower Classes. The Cook, the Server/waiter, the chambermaid. We catch a glimpse as one of the help walks backward across the Atrium, yet it only severs as a curiosity.

Was this deliberate? He does take several characters, (The politician etc) and slightly expands their 2-D presentation, but doesn't fully paint a picture. For the HH, there is - nothing.

I think he missed a real chance here - fleshing out - say a maid or cook with some cogent thoughts and feelings and the same for one or two of the "Upper Class" types could have added a lot of depth to the story. It would have also privided a baseline from which to comment on the Eloi/Morlocks. To be fair, I doubt Mr Wells had thought the book would still be in print some 123 years later....

 

Actually, me and "The Lost Continent" are not getting along and I have put it aside, stopped at chapter 4. I will probably pick it up again if and when everyone else starts reading it. I love the story and the characters but the way it's written drives me up the wall! I find that I have to reread some sections as don't know what the hell they're talking about and it gets annoying after a few chapters. It's written in a manner that one is reading a translation of this old, lost document, a very rough translation but more likely the author is going for more of a 'direct' translation, a word-for-word translation. When one interprets/translates one normal interprets/translates the meaning, not word for word, because most the time it won't make sense if you do that...and many times this doesn't. Pity really because I don't think it gains anything by this...

 

The clip above is from the Epilogue. I put a part in italics. When I read that, I thought no matter what generation, where someone is in time, they seem to question the stability of their world. Here on the Monkey, we prepare because we are concerned about economical collapse. This is really an interesting line: saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.

I did wonder if they had as far to fall as we do today. We always think of the past as simpler, closer to our roots. But is that true?

 

I've been working on Book 2 of the Roll call series (on and off) . This is something I've given more than a little thought to over the last while.

Q Why is a team of horses better than a tractor?

Back on task...
Fall back is relative.

FAll back from massive, fuel intensive Corporate farms to:
'family farms' - still with tractors etc.
Small landholder farms - but with just rototillers.small tractors
Small share-cropper farms with horses/mules?

Substance (truck garden sized) farming w/just enough to eat plus a bit extra for barter

Or starvation, because the land can't carry more than a few with 'natural foods"


A - A tractor cannot make more tractors. Also - you cannot eat a tractor in a pinch...

 

Good point, tractor vs horse. Was there any one point in time that was perfect or good enough yet advancement happened? I don’t if humans know how not to advance. they say if you stop learning that it is bad. Why would someone want to go to the future? It is impossible to stop advancing. Inevitably to fall back and destroy its makers in the end.

 

My grand dad was born in 1873 to a German immigrant who had fought in the Civil War with the First Minnesota at Gettysburg and had survived and a Lakota who had been born to a free people but were on the reservations by the time he was born. He was 87 when he died in 1960. He was 30 years old when the first airplane flew and lived until the atomic bombs, jet airplanes and my grandmother, born in 1874, lived to be a hundred and watched men walk on the moon. They both agreed that the best time to live in their lives was from about 1895 until about 1910. The rural life they lived then in rural Minnesota was almost self sufficient, no electricity, no gasoline engines for much of it, not a lot of money, but they didn't spend much either. They were young, healthy, and raising a family and enjoyed life to the fullest. Life was not to stressed, medicine was fairly good, a train could get you almost anywhere in the US in a few days and they traveled to Germany and Norway on steam ships in comfort. He said life started to go downhill with the beginning of WW1, went crazy for a few years after with everything wild, and then the depression crushed everything until WW2, and then the cold war afterward. We got more and more technology, but less and less mental comfort out of all our progress. Given that it looks like more people are dying of drug overdoses than car, airplane, bus, train, and ship accidents, looks like things aren't improving. I admit his best time was for a middle class white, but he lived well, was his own boss, was half "indian" and had an 8 grade education, so I guess there was some upward mobility still occurring. Most of his grand sons and grand daughters went to college and very few of us have had either the education or peace of mind he did.
I wonder if they felt the same as the story takes place during that time period and the people used in the story all are the "best class" of that time period. They even still had the empire and the royalty and people with family money that could build time machines if they wished.

DKR, there has always been natural checks that kept the population at a level that the land and the current level of technology could support. You can either limit it by controlling the number of births, expanding the resource base available with more land or more technology, or the number of deaths occurring will bring it back into balance. Real problem is the fluctuations that occur at both the peaks and the valleys. War, disease, starvation, postponing marriage, large numbers of celibate religious members, have been the classical way to stability over the last few thousand years In the time traveler, the morlocks .are unable to expand their population, they are limited to the resources that are remaining and are not capable of building any new, and the eloi are totally dependent on the morlocks for anything that requires technology. Both spiraling down to nothing as their interlocking worlds collapse. But that is their view of life, In some wild area, jungle, desert, self sufficient community, life may continue as it always has and the world never even knows.

 

@duane
A common meme seen in many Scifi books and movies is the 'Return from the Fall'. The Fall being the collapse of civilization to some prior - and lower - level of civilization. I don't know why SciFi seem to be so hung up on this particular meme. Maybe because the writers are so dependent on civilization to stay alive?

I could go live in a cabin, one with no electric, running water etc and could work long hours in a garden - just to eat.

Doesn't mean I would look forward to such a situation, but I could make do. Many would not be able to - from a lack of knowledge or a lack of willingness to endure the hard work required to live in a non-technic civilization....

 

DKR, at 80 years old, I and my wife are self sufficient for any expected lifetime we might expect to have if things fall apart. Would not require much of a lifestyle change, no more citrus fruits, much different fresh veggies in the winter, etc, and the next major medical emergency would probably be the last one we would have to worry about. I have no expectation of surviving a real full blown crash and seeing re emergence after it at my age. While the area I live in, southern New Hampshire, suits me well and has for 50 years, it is not survivable in the long term. If my neighbors, who in the last 30 years have transformed from a majority of hard working almost self sufficient northern European small farmers and working class people, to bedroom people who work in banking, education, retail, and IT, etc and are sheeple, and even now use all their political power etc to limit my ability to be self sufficient through zoning, taxes,, health regulations,etc, and will in the future confiscate any such provisions in a second if they need them and "redistribute" those hoarded resources. In addition if the present "opioid" crisis and the near riots with any attempts to limit the "free lunch" programs are any indication, those who prefer to live a hedonistic life and depend on the labors of others are more than happy to use force to take it from others if it is not freely given. With out any hope of protective actions being taken by individuals or small groups being effective, the sheeple will not allow it until it is too late. I am afraid that much of the doomer fiction, science fiction or other, may actually be a little optimistic for most of those living in the "blue" states.

 

@duane
Redistribution of the 'wealth; is nothing new.

My late FIL served in the PTO and went ashore with McArthur as a bodyguard for the loon. Dad returned to his native Utah and lived out his days. He didn't have 'food storage' in the classic sense many believe (erroneously)) that Mormon family's supposedly have in the basement. The family kept a back-yard garden for vegis in the summer and ran a small hobby farm - more to supplement the family income vice food production.

I asked him why he didn't raise/store more food. He answer was illuminating - In the PI he had seen first hand the results of food storage. What 'extra' food that was not stolen by ones 'good neighbors" was taken - at gunpoint - by local authorities as "taxes".

I'm certain other could share stories along this line from just about anywhere in the developed world that has hit a crisis - such as we see ongoing in the Socialist paradise of Venezuela.

 

How bad can it get?






Russia today....

Pretty bad and we still have a 'civilization'

I'm thinking if 'civilization' falls part, a lot of folks won't even notice...because it has already happened for them.