Time Gentlemen Please
01/09/2002 . Source: Rod MacDonald 

Rod serves up an historical Perspective of HG Wells' 'The Time Machine' - in print, as well as HG's recent sfx-dripping voyage onto the big screen.

Buy The Time Machine in the USA - or Buy The Time Machine in the UK

The Time Machine - an Historical Perspective.
by Roderick S. MacDonald

At 32,000 words, 'The Time Machine' by HG Wells is more a novelette than a novel. Project Gutenberg's website at www.gutenberg.org is an excellent place to download this and a host of other books zloty free (also free in other currencies including the Euro).

Not overly arduous to read, you'll comfortably zoom through the somewhat staid Victorian text on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and there's been plenty of them recently.

The first thing you'll notice is that the original varies considerably from both the 1960 film starring Rod Taylor and the recent abominable effort which was reviewed in the July edition. The Time Traveller, as he is referred to in the novelette, relates his experiences in first person to a group of his associates, most without names too.

We have the Medical Man, the Psychologist and the Provincial Mayor to name a few and this anonymity gives the impression that any one of us could be the Time Traveller himself. Perhaps Wells intended this to be the case? Either that or he couldn't think of names for his characters.

At any rate, the Time Traveller is more of a Dr. Who figure than a man with a specific mission. (Perhaps it's wrong to compare him to someone who came later but this is all about time travel, isn't it?) He is an adventurer. Maybe, as we all have, he has a few qualms about society and the way it is progressing but this isn't his reason for wishing to travel through time. He wants to see what's out there. He wants to rise above the lives of ordinary humans to see what destiny decrees for our pitiful existence.

 Wells should have attempted to write more adventures for the Time Traveller thus giving us a collection of Dr. Who type stories going backwards and forwards in time. We'd have more educational stories than Dr. Who because I think Wells would have attempted to socially analyse time periods other than his own.

This in itself would have been interesting for us today. Reviewing other times from the viewpoint of 1898, when the original was written, would also give us considerable understanding of late Victorian attitudes but it would fall down on its science. A lot has happened in the last one-hundred-and-four years.

After his encounter with the Morlocks and Eloi about eight-hundred-thousand years hence, the Time Traveller decided to see what the future had in store for earth. Travelling thirty million years forward, he came to a dying world where our planet always kept the same face towards the sun, much as the moon's rotation has been captured by the Earth today as a result of tidal forces.

Though this will happen to Earth, it won't be for billions of years and it will be caused by the Moon's gravity, not the sun's. Huge crab creatures moved over the beach while overhead strange flying things circled in an endless quest for food. It was a depressing, futile place.

In the Wells future, the sun was a cool, giant sphere near the end of its life and all the planets had all spiraled inwards to become quite close to this meagre source of heat. The latter, he simply got wrong because it had been known for some time before 1898 that planetary orbits don't behave in this way. Irrespective of how old the sun is, planets don't move closer unless something acts to slow them down.

It's also the case that in thirty million years time, the sun will be little different from what it is today. In fact, we'll have to wait another five billion years before the sun begins to end its life, first as a bloated red giant which will envelope the inner planets, and then as a progressively cooling white dwarf star.

A century ago nobody knew what process acted to make the sun hot. It was speculated that a huge cloud of gas had condensed and the energy released from the friction of this event kept it at a reasonable temperature.

Physicists of the time calculated that the energy derived from the collapse of a mass of gas the size of the sun would only keep it going for a few million years - a long time to us but totally insufficient for all the geological processes to form the Earth's surface and for evolution to produce us. They didn't know about nuclear fusion! It was, however, a brave attempt by Wells to show what fate awaited the Earth.

Wells also had no idea when writing the novelette that, within his own lifetime, two immensely destructive world wars would be fought. In his fictional future where the Time Traveller met the Eloi and the Morlocks, this separation into above and below ground species had been caused by the divergence of society from its social groups.

This rigid stratification was so deeply ingrained in Victorian society that Wells must have considered it to be permanent and beyond change. The upstairs/downstairs life of the time was extrapolated to produce the Eloi and Morlocks. This being the case, one wonders if Hudson was a cannibal in the making!

The Time Traveller acquired a female companion by the name of Weena but she was a child-like being who required his protection against the Morlocks. There was no sexual attraction between them. Unfortunately, the poor girl was roasted in a forest fire, probably after she was killed, and the Time Traveller while somewhat put out, was nonetheless glad she'd escaped the jaws of the cannibalistic Morlocks.

The 1960 film, produced and directed by George Pal, is the one most of us are familiar with when it comes to 'The Time Machine' story. Here, the Time Traveller is a more congenial and human figure. Again, he is an adventurer but he's also dismayed and distraught at the almost constant state of war which seems to exist in his time.

Looking for something better in the future, he almost comes to grief in a nuclear war and is entombed within a massive lava flow which forces him to travel eight-hundred-thousand years into the future. In fact, it's the nuclear war which causes events on Earth to transpire as they do.

This is a delightful film. With its time-lapse photography which gives the illusion of speeding through the hours, days and months, we were intrigued and enchanted by its effects. It was a mistake to try this again with a new film. The Time Traveller, George by name, took sides with the Eloi in the future conflict and he developed a romantic liaison with Weena.

Admittedly, the Morlocks are sloth-like creatures afraid of a burning match but in their situation, they probably didn't have to be much more than this. After all, for thousands of years they only had to cope with the mindless wimps from the surface which hardly necessitated them being battle-hardened storm troopers.

The 1960 Academy Award for best special effects went to Gene Warren & Tim Baar for 'The Time Machine'. The ferocity of the nuclear explosion that destroyed London was chillingly effective, especially because it was dated to occur in the mid-sixties, right in the middle of the cold war. Overall, this film was enhanced by the quality of direction and special effects and also by Rod Taylor who gave a good performance as George.

I bought the DVD version of this movie. It also included a contemporary lengthy feature on the making of the film and other aspects of its production, hosted by Rod Taylor, which explain how the actual machine was constructed, how it was sold to a travelling showman and subsequently, it's retrieval and refurbishment.

The machine used in the recent film is very similar to the above version. In fact, with its time bubble, I'd say the new version is better than the old but other than that, the 1960 film is far superior in just about every way.

I would even say that the 1960 film is better than the original story by Wells. It's more complete, compassionate and poignant. Where the original Time Traveller wanders through time, almost as a tourist, the Rod Taylor portrayal is more like us. He cared enough for Weena to return to the future to be with her and to help rebuild civilisation whereas the novelette version just disappears in time, seemingly depressed at the fateful final outcome to Earth's history.

One thing that is never explained in any of the versions is the modus operandi of the time machine itself. Sure, we have explanations about time being the fourth dimension, which is just an extension of the other three dimensions of length, breadth and height but nobody tries to explain how the machine actually passes through time.

This is probably because nobody has the faintest idea. Perhaps the disk of the machine would have to rotate with an angular velocity in excess of light but, as we all know, this is impossible for a vast number of reasons, Einstein's relatively notwithstanding. Anyway, should someone actually know how it's done, they'd likely use their machine to skip into the future, write down the lottery numbers and then return to make a fortune.

Why was the Time Machine story successful? There's a certain fascination we all have about looking into the future. Some try it with cards, tea leaves, fortune tellers or the entrails of a goat, each method probably as effective as the other, while the more intellectual try to study trends in history, physiology, sociology and the stock market, with a similar lack of success. The future isn't determined!

Even if we have a good idea of how things may go, it's only guesswork. Like H. G. Wells, we are unable to predict what will happen in the next fifty years.

Making a journey through time would be a fascinating experience. We would be surprised and shocked to see what will materialise. And, as the traveller, we'd see our friends and family grow old while we remained untouched. For a while, it would seem that we've escaped the whole process of time itself. We'd be as gods.

But it isn't like that. In the 1960 film, George met his friend's son on two occasions, first to be told that the old friend had been killed in the First World War and second, when the son was an elderly air raid warden, just before the nuclear bomb exploded. In the additional DVD material, an aged George travels back to prevent his friend being killed.

This time, the ageing was in reverse.

Time catches up with us whatever we do.