https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3242653.html

The book is very short, and it's actually a bit unpolished - it was Wells' first published fiction, so it's written with passion and energy, but not a lot of reflection. It's a bit weird, for instance, that some of the Time Traveller's friends are identified by name - Filby, Blank, Dash, Chose - and others by profession - the Provincial Mayor, the Psychologist, the Very Young Man, the Medical Man, the Journalist, the Editor of a well-known daily paper - actually two of the latter are Dash and Chose, and the editor may be Blank, but "Blank" and "Dash" are essentially the same as "_____________" which is all we are given of the Time Traveller's own name. (Wells does something similar in The War of the Worlds.)

But then we get into the voyage through time part of the story, and this is simply splendid - both the future of the year 802,701 with Eloi vs Morlocks, and the far future of the dying Earth millions of years away. (It's a shame that a big chunk of Chapter XI was excised for book publication - it makes the far future section even more powerful.) The Edenic life of the Eloi, contrasted with the demonic Morlocks, is a very powerful dichotomy, especially when set against the Time Traveller's communication difficulties; though it's more than a little creepy that the Time Traveller decides that the Eloi are basically the evolved middle and upper classes and the Morlocks the degenerated proletariat. It's also fairly clear what's going on with Weena, and that's also more than a little creepy (in real life, Wells was living with his 22-year-old girlfriend who he would marry later that year after the divorce from his first wife came through).

However, sometimes the function of literature is to raise questions rather than answer them, and The Time Machine certainly does that. It's a pretty powerful debut, and it remains Wells' top novel (as measured by LibraryThing and Goodreads).

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2963023.html

Dr Moreau is one of the earliest mad scientists in sf history, and possibly the first to experiment on living creatures via surgery (Frankenstein's subjects are dead, at least when he starts working on them). It's one of Wells' early huge successes, published in 1896, the year after The Time Machine and the year before The War of the Worlds. The plot is rather basic - protagonist is shipwrecked, and ends up on an island where Dr Moreau is engaging in horrendous experiments to instill humanity into animals; it all goes wrong, Moreau is killed by his creations, and only the narrator escapes to tell us (and, scarred by the experience, he ends up fearing his neighbours in a passage reminiscent of Gulliver after the Houyhnhnms). It's short and taut; the central point is laid on pretty thick, but not for very long; the thrust of the story is a critique of the idea that science will inevitably improve life for us all (and if anything it is Moreau, the villain, who is identified with imperialism).

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3381056.html

One of H.G. Wells' famous novels which I had somehow never read before. There are several interesting points to it.

First, the narrator, Bedford, is thoroughly imperialist and sees the Moon as a new Africa to exploit (and get his name all over it). But he's also clearly a very unpleasant chap, and I don't think it's too much to see Wells mocking imperialism as simply answering the wrong questions, once Bedford and Cavor get to the Moon and discover that it just doesn't really compute.

Second, Cavor is a classic absent-minded scientist, but a rather early example of the type. He is exploited by Bedford and then by the Selenites, having made a great discovery and then not really applied it very practically.

Third, the moon itself is a bit of a disappointment for today's reader; I think Wells was trying for somewhere between alien and incomprehensible, but to be honest it ends up as the prototype of a pulp alien planet (with a bit of preaching about the perfect society). No doubt it seemed fresher to readers in 1901. He would have known perfectly well that the Moon has no atmosphere.

Fourth, Wells is rather disappointing in the way he often reaches for comic yokels - Cavor's assistants in the early chapters, who are seriously injured in an explosion, and the boy who is carried away by the capsule at the end, are simply played for laughs; no empathy is expected of the reader.

Fifth, there are a couple of lovely set-pieces - the initial introduction of the town of Lympne, and the chapter "Mr Bedford in Infinite Space" - which have Wells at his best in terms of vivid writing.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1194445.html

I had forgotten just how good this is. Its 200 pages far outshine all later (and mostly longer) invasion-of-Earth stories (or even just disaster stories like The Stand). It feels so very fresh, one of the basic plots of science fiction being written for the first time. Yes, of course it's strongly reliant on tales of human wars, both those set in the contemporary late nineteenth century and those set in the (then) near future; but this chilling sentence - of mildly dodgy grammar but impeccable pace - in the first paragraph makes it clear that this is not about the Germans:

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

In the earlier chapters, there's a fixation with circumstantial detail - especially of the geography of Surrey - which gives the whole narrative an immediacy which is curiously intensified as the conflict goes on and fewer and fewer characters get names - 'the artilleryman', 'the curate', and rather oddly to today's reader, 'my wife'. (And 'my brother', though his lady friends, the Elphinstones, do get names.)

So much here is reminiscent of later stories and indeed of history - the rescue of the English refugees by small boats from the rest of Europe is an odd inversion of Dunkirk; the tripods pop up in John Christopher; the gas warfare waged by the aliens against London was soon to happen in real life.
Anyway, a really excellent, short read. ( )