The Time Machine (Archive Episode)

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Hello, I'm Simon, producer of In Our Time.

Following Melvin's announcement that he's stepped down from In Our Time after almost 27 years, we're taking the time to celebrate his outstanding work with some favourite episodes from our archive.

And thanks to everyone who's been in touch.

In due course, we'll return with new programmes and a new presenter, but till then, here's Melvyn with The Time Machine from 2019.

Hello, in 1895 H.G.

Wells wrote The Time Machine, in which the wealthy time traveller goes to the year 800 and 2701 AD and is shocked by the future.

He meets the Eloi, descended from elite people like himself, but much smaller, weaker and aimless, and the Morlocks, the descendants of factory workers who live underground and farm the Eloi for their meat.

Wells' exploration of class struggle, evolution and eugenics was informed by the latest ideas in science and politics and it's been highly influential ever since.

With me to discuss the Time Machine by H.G.

Wells are Amanda Rees, an historian of science at the University of York, Simon James, professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, and Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University.

Simon Schaffer, how did HG Wells start out in life?

Wells's early life is dominated by the facts that he's poor and he's bright

and he's young and he's extremely ill.

And

the first, what, 20 years of his life are a struggle for existence.

What was his illness?

He had lung disease

and he'd broken his leg.

The advantage of having broken his leg is that he kept some time in bed and read avidly.

The disadvantage of the lung disease is that really for most of his life he was ill, he was suffering, he was struggling.

His parents

are remarkable and I think important for his early years.

His father was an absolutely brilliant fast bowler for Kent.

He took four wickets in four balls for the county, which is still something of a record.

But he was much worse, was Wells's father, at running a shop in Bromley, a kind of China shop.

Wells, H.G.

loathed Bromley.

He described it as a suburb of the damnedest.

His mother, on the other hand, had been a servant and housekeeper in a country house in Sussex.

That's where she'd met Wells' father.

Wells reminisced that it was from his father that he got his skill, from his mother that he got his imagination.

And

a lot of Wells's early life is both an attempt to escape that upbringing, but also to reflect on what it meant.

How did he get the education that led him to be able to write the time machine?

He had to fight for it.

At the age of 18, after an immense struggle, he was admitted as a pupil student at what was then called the Normal School of Science, now part of Imperial College in South Kensington, and he spent three extraordinarily important years there, from the age of 18 to the age of 21.

The first year was undoubtedly the most important,

1884, because he was taught by Thomas Henry Huxley.

Huxley was Darwin's bulldog, the one of perhaps the most famous man of science in Victorian London, an expositor of natural selection and of Darwinism, a man of extraordinary charisma, to whom, in fact, Wells eventually sent a copy of the Time Machine as a gift,

alleging that it was partly an illustration of Huxley's views.

And who else?

That's one person who educated him.

We're still in his first year.

Two to go.

Then what happened?

So he passed his first year with flying colours and then, perhaps not untypically for a very bright, struggling student, he got into student politics and journalism and sex.

And the combination of those three

took him perhaps rather away from the sciences.

It wasn't helped by the fact that whereas Huxley was a brilliant teacher in zoology and biology, the physics teachers who dominated Wells' student career in his second and his third year, Fred Guthrie and Charles Boyes, were much less charismatic.

And Wells barely passed his second year and completely flunked his final year.

So, how did he come to be the chap who wrote the book?

A few years later.

Having a few years later.

the normal school with no degree.

He then worked as a teacher.

He began his extraordinary career initially as a science journalist and a writer of stories.

He was writing hundreds of pieces each year.

By the time

the version that we know of the Time Machine appears in 1894 and 1895, he was beginning to earn real money.

He was earning in our money something close to 50,000 quid a year, which is a lot as a journalist and writer.

He did get a science degree as an external student of the University of London.

He was smart enough in his mid-twenties to write an entire textbook in biology and zoology, which is an important achievement.

So if Heroes ought to didact, apart from having some snippets of superior education.

Fine, Simon James.

There were already books about characters being transported to the future when Wells brought out the Time Machine.

The two most influential seem to have been by Bellamy and Morris.

Can you tell us about those two?

That's That's right.

So Bellamy's Looking Backward was an American publication, tremendously successful on both sides of the Atlantic, unusually an American socialist literary text, which portrays a future in which there is no private property, in which everybody works, in which the state is a giant corporation, everybody does manual labor from the ages of 18 to 21, and everybody retires at the age of 45.

And while this was tremendously popular, this is

a vision that William Morris rebels against.

When Morris reviewed Looking Backward, he says that every utopia betrays or reveals the personality of its author.

And as you would imagine,

Morris found a kind of highly technological

future and a dystopian rather than a utopian vision.

So William Morris writes News from Nowhere, which is a much more pastoral, much more Arcadian version of the future where where people live simply, live in the countryside, and things are beautiful.

And a gentle anarchy prevails.

Absolutely, yes, which I think is a part of Wells's problem with it.

And so Wells knew those were his forerunners, our other forerunners, Mark Twain had written about,

and Jules Verne had written, but did he come in slightly on the back of Bellamy?

Yes, I think he did.

And of course, Simon has mentioned Wells' student politics.

Wells had heard Morris speak.

So I think

he was very much dealing with Morris's ideas as foundational in his politics, but rebelling against Morris's way of writing the future when he comes to the time machine.

Can you give us a brief outline of the plot of the time machine?

Yes, of course.

So we have a first-person narrator at the beginning of the story who is invited to dinner by the brilliant inventor, the time traveller, as it will be convenient to speak of him.

We never know the time traveller's name.

And the time traveller shows the narrator and his other upper-middle-class male friends a time machine.

The time traveller imagines, asks his audience to imagine that time is a fourth dimension, like the other three spatial dimensions, and then invites them to reflect on what it would be like to be able to move quickly and freely in the fourth dimension, just as technological innovations in transport allow human beings to move in the three spatial dimensions.

So the time traveller throws himself forward into the future.

He travels into the world 802701, and he's very surprised.

He expects to see a future like Bellamy's future in looking backward, but instead he finds that

the society is not at all technological, that it's again it's peaceful and rural, and that human beings are not what he expects them to be either.

And there are two sets of human beings, those above ground and those below ground, and they are

the Eloi and the Morlocks.

Eloi above grounds, they're sort of the degenerated descendants of the aristocracy, and the Morlocks are the emphatic descendants of the proletariat.

That's right.

And he encounters the Eloi first.

They are

pretty, but they're stupid.

They're shorter than the human beings of the time traveller's own time.

They have a very simple language of only about 500 words.

They sit around playing beautifully, eating fruit, and he finds them generally rather useless.

And the Morlocks?

The Morlocks are the underground creatures whom he discovers later on in the book.

The Morlocks are ape-like, and

he's much more revolted by them.

He finds the Eloi beautiful, but the Morlocks

stir up violence and an antipathy in his heart.

But it turns out that the Morlocks are the more technologically advanced of the two subspecies of humanity in the future.

The Morlocks live underground, and unlike the Eloi, they have machines.

And they cannibalize the Eloi.

They groom the Eloi for their meat.

That's right.

That's the grisly discovery that the time traveller makes part way through.

So in a grisly act of class revenge, the Morlocks literally get to eat the rich.

So, as the proletarians have become

the Morlocks,

the aristocracy have become the Eloi, and while the Eloi eat fruit, what the Morlocks eat is Eloi.

And one way or another, the time traveller notices all this and then manages just

to escape and to come back to meet the same gentleman around the same table in Richmond a week in our time later, tells them all this, they only half believe him, and then

he goes off again, and they never hear of him again.

Why does it matter, Amanda Reese, that the traveller has a machine to convey him to where he's going?

Because there have been plenty of time travel stories before H.G.

Wells's the time machine, but they all depend on chance or divine intervention.

So, somebody lies down and goes to sleep and is transported into the future.

Somebody goes to visit a god.

There's several sort of myths, Hindu myths, Indian myths as well,

that have basically people going to visit the divine and while they're in heaven not noticing that in fact time has passed by on earth more swiftly than they'd expect it and they are effectively in their own future.

So you have all of these tales of travelling forward in time, but there's no control and there's no direction.

And what matters for Wells is the fact that this is a machine.

This is something that is produced by humans and is under human control.

The writer Nalo Hopkinson once defined science fiction as that branch of literature which deals with the consequences for humanity of the use of tools.

And the machine is a tool for manipulating time and being able to move through time in a controlled fashion and in a controlled way.

One of the interesting things, I must have read it when I was a kid, but I read it for this programme obviously, is that the opening is quite stiff.

It became an enormous bestseller instantly and enormously influential, still is.

It is quite stiff.

There's a serious scientific discussion goes on in the the first two or three chapters.

The fourth dimension that this new idea, that that new idea, he's read it in nature, he's read it here, they all agree, the doctor, the psychologist, and so on and so forth.

Does it surprise you, looking back, that this sort of discussion could start a book that would have such an enormous popular success?

No, not at all.

I think what's really important about the introduction,

the first part of the book, is that it's,

you know, science fiction is often criticised for not being realist, whatever that means, but this is a profoundly realist introduction.

You are within the domestic sphere, you are within the lived life of upper-middle-class professional Victorian households.

Like Sherlock Holmes has set up, isn't it?

It's that domestication that makes it possible for Wells to domesticate the impossible later on and to make it real for the readership.

Did he use the machine and use his knowledge of sciences, which Simon pointed out at the beginning of the programme,

because he thought this might really happen, or just as a way to beguile and entrap his readers?

I think that there are two ways of answering that.

And I think the most important way has to do, it depends on what you think, in a sense, science fiction is for, or

that genre or that mode of engagement is for.

If you think of it as something that's as a kind of sugar-coated way of increasing the public understanding of science, then people are sometimes surprised when they read the time machine to find there's actually so little detail on exactly how it happened.

You know, how you don't actually get to find out an awful lot about how the time machine works.

It's, you know, I always read it and think, well, this is basically H.

G.

Wells, the cyclist, the cycling enthusiast, and effectively the handles are the kind of the are the handlebars and the the seat is the saddle kind of thing.

But it's less important to think about you know what the understanding of time travel was, I think, and more to think about the ways in which Wells is using the experiences of the time traveller to reflect essentially on the nature of of humanity and on the nature of the human condition and how in essence we recognise the humanity in each other.

There is not a contradiction but a contrast between the limited nature of our knowledge of this machine, he sits in an armchair, presses a few buttons and away he goes, and the not unlimited but very wide open, given the space, discussion of the ideas of the time.

So he's way up with the ideas, the ideas about this dimension, that dimension, physics, biology.

But in the end, you're right, it's a bicycle armchair.

What do you have to say to that, Simon Simshafer?

Wells is pretty explicit about this.

Much later in his life, he points out that the diamond frame bicycle and his story of the time machine appeared at exactly the same moment.

And as Amanda says, the saddle and the seat and the handlebars absolutely speak to this extraordinary revolution in social relations relations that cheap and affordable bicycling had, above all, you might say, on the middle class and the working class's capacity to travel and on the capacity of the sexes to meet each other away from their parents, two things that mattered a great deal to Wells, as we know from the fiction that he followed Time Machine with.

There's something else, just to expand a little on what Amanda has already said about the domestication of the impossible.

Again,

that's Wells's phrase,

which is cinema.

A few months after the appearance of Time Machine, he was contacted by an electrical engineer called Robert Paul, who was Thomas Alvare Edison's cinema agent in London.

And what Paul wanted to do was to turn the Time Machine into a movie.

An extraordinary vision.

Wells and Paul collaborate.

Paul wrote a patent, as far as we can tell, on a machine for reproducing the effects of time travel.

It wasn't, in other words, just that Wells had evoked a machine, but that the experience of travelling on such a machine began to conform ever more closely with the experience the Victorian audience in London was beginning to have in 1895 and 96 of early cinema.

You want to come in, Amanda?

I was just going that there's a proposal for a fair ground ride as well, isn't there?

So that effectively that people can go to the fair and experience what it would have been like physically for themselves to travel in the time machine.

Simon, we come to this this unnamed planet

place.

Well he's here, isn't it?

I mean it's time we're talking about, not space.

So he ends up near the Thames,

where he starts from.

There's a description of the Thames estuary.

All of us are taken rather by surprise about that.

Because all of of us are talking about the Thames Estuary, nearly a million years old.

Never mind, there he is.

We have the Eloy and the Morlocks.

What does the Traveller's reaction to them tell us about the time and about him?

I suppose that the time traveller says at the end that he invites his audience to take his story when they don't believe him as a prophecy or a warning.

And I think Wells sees

the de-evolution of Homo sapiens into the Elo and the Morlocks as being a warning about the biological consequences of the political inequality of his of his own time.

He's put pressure on the class differences of the late 19th century, hasn't he put immense pressure on it, so 700 and odd thousand years on it, and ended up with this.

That's absolutely right, because Wells in his writing always wants to teach his audience a lesson.

It's very much the hallmark of his fifty-year writing career, right from the very beginning here, right until the end.

And he always says that he would call himself a teacher or a journalist before he would ever call himself an artist.

So,

what is he trying to tell us about the Eloy and then about the Morlocks?

We know that we've said they're small, they're useless, they eat fruit, they moon about, they have a few dances, they don't speak, they haven't many words of their language.

But what is he saying by saying that?

The class divisions of that the class divisions that eventually result in the biological differences between the Eloy and the Morlocks can be fixed in Wells's worldview with education.

Now, education is Wells'

panacea for the social divisions that he sees

in the world that he lives in.

Later on, he identifies science and socialism as being essentially the same thing.

It's about seeing the world in a particular way and an informed way that allows you to address it and fix it and try and make it better.

It's a pretty pessimistic and bitter view

of us, isn't it?

We either end up as sort of weedy, small and useless and singing and eating raspberries, or we end up as deep in the earth, white,

creepy and murderous, cannibalist.

That's about it.

There isn't anybody else knocking about, is there?

Well, Wells really struggled to reconcile his optimism and his pessimism.

I wonder if as a scientist he's a pessimist and as someone interested in politics he's an optimist.

He writes in the outline of history later on that human history becomes more and more of a race between education and catastrophe.

And while he's recommending education in some of his political writings, in the time machine, he shows a catastrophe that this is what happens if you don't listen to people like me.

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It's interesting that the catastrophe seizes the public imagination, isn't it, Amanda?

And he brings in the idea of eugenics, which were important then and believed in there.

Not now,

but they were mainstream then.

Can you say how they play inside this novel?

Well, to a certain extent, what Simon James just had to say about the kind of the and what you yourself have said,

you can see it as a kind of the division between the Morloy Morloy?

I've just invented a new category.

The division between the Eloy and the Morlocks as the literal kind of representation of upstairs, downstairs, in terms of the spaces that they're occupying.

He's taught by Huxley, as Simon Schaffer has already said, but I think that the most significant point here has to do with

the notion of planning and the idea of being able to plan for a future and the idea of being able to plan for humanity.

Because fundamentally what he is challenging, I think, in his account and his vision of what

this human future might look like, he's challenging the notion of progress, he's challenging the notion that intelligence is necessarily the thing that's going to lead to our salvation.

And that's all tied up with the issues that he has with the machine, with the machine economy,

with the city and relationships to nature, and so on.

But I mean, fundamentally, what's at issue here, I think, is

the question of

to what extent can you

create a human future by design?

He's challenging the idea that

there's an end point to evolution.

Simon Schaffer, we have two Simons with us, as you might have picked up by now.

Where did he get that pessimism from?

His own life was optimistically driven.

He loved science, and he would say,

this is a great bounty of knowledge.

On he would go.

And yet, as far as I can tell,

there's not a drop, there's not a gram of optimism in the whole of the Morlock-Eloy relationship.

No, there is nothing

progressive or salvation-oriented in the bulk of the Time Machine story, and not only that, but things get even worse than that.

When he goes on, it goes on for a tiny bit at the end of the book.

He goes on about 30 million years and discovers the whole thing is coming to an end, the sun's burning everything out, and then he comes back home.

So

it seems to me the driving force of the time machine is what he calls the tragedy of extinction.

The The main lesson is undoubtedly pessimistic.

This is what he tells Huxley when he sends Huxley a copy of the book.

He says, this is about the contradiction between

plenty and intelligence.

If you want to be ingenious, you have to struggle.

If social development removes the pressure of struggle, it will also divide us between Downton Abbey and the the Satanic Mills.

So

the pessimism, it seems to me, comes from not just what contemporary natural science is saying, but also, and this is always crucial for Wells, he wants to use his writing to intervene in science.

He isn't just passively transmitting it.

This book is an argument, and the argument is partly: do not suppose that natural selection on its own will give us or guarantee or produce social progress.

That is an argument with contemporary biology and politics as well as an argument derived from contemporary biology and politics.

During the exact period that he was writing

the final published version of Time Machine, his master, Huxley, had given one of the greatest science lectures of the 19th century, which is Evolution and Ethics delivered at Oxford.

And in Evolution and Ethics, Huxley makes the extraordinarily important point,

a point that not everyone at Oxford at the moment seems to remember, that human ethics are contradictory to the principles of Darwinism.

Huxley's argument is that if humans are going to progress, they have to register their capacity to break with natural selection.

That artificial selection, social ethics, are not given to us by the principles of Darwinism.

We have to fight against them.

Wells' book, finally, is an intervention in that extraordinarily important debate against what he calls, magnificent phrase, excelsior biology, a version of biology he loathed.

Simon James, the traveller explains this to his dinner guests.

He's only been away a week as far as they're concerned.

Even though when he came through the door, he looks racked a bit, he's got scars, his clothes are filthy, he looks as if he's been through the mill and so on.

He's already been called a person too clever to be believed,

and he tries to explain to them what he has done.

Is there a sense that,

well,

Wells seems to me to be using this to explain to the audience, audience, to give it plausibility to the audience, but is there anything more to it than that?

Well, I think Wells is very conscious of the time traveller's lack of plausibility

in his story.

In the first inner party at the beginning, he shows them a mini-time machine and makes it disappear.

But

the book frames this in an atmosphere that makes it look like a magic trick or possibly

an act of hypnosis, perhaps, that

their focus is on a darkening pool of light.

One of the guests says, Now, is this for real, or is it like the ghost that you showed us last Christmas?

That

the time traveller has absolutely no proof

of his going into the future, other than the two flowers that Weena, the female Eloy, whom he befriends, gives him that don't seem to correspond to.

Delissa's got to know about this.

The thing he brings back are two flowers given to him by this child

Eloy, who he protects.

She's given, and they somehow come back and he puts them on the table table as if to say so there.

Yes.

That's right.

And

the botanist at his guest does look at the flowers and say, well, these don't like any other flowers I've ever seen.

So it's this tantalizing

little bit of proof.

Can I ask you to take on something that Simon Shopper was saying?

The need for humanity to be kept keen on the grindstone and necessity.

What do you have to say about that?

Well, I think this is the playing out in the future that the time traveller sees of sexual selection and natural selection, the two great engines of the Darwinian theory of evolution.

When Darwin writes The Origin of Species, he tries to put a happy ending on it.

When Darwin himself read fiction, he preferred fiction with a happy ending.

So he writes The Origin of Species and tries to make it end nicely and says that from famine, from war, from extinction of species, you know, most wonderful beings have been and are being evolved.

But of course, lots of people read Darwin and said, but Charles, that's not what you're actually arguing in your book.

That intelligence, you know, or beauty or sophistication in a species aren't in themselves intrinsically rewarded by evolution.

What evolution rewards is fitness for a species' environment.

And the environment of humanity becomes very managed, becomes very calm, becomes very controlled, becomes very stable, and therefore it's not to humanity's advantage anymore to be intelligent.

Why, Amanda Mandaris, do you think that Well set up such a contrast between the Eloy and the Morlocks?

Such a massive contrast, with nothing in between, no gradations, no subtleties.

Bang, defeat, useless, finished, bang, brutal, cannibals in charge, but underground.

It's actually a pattern that he's followed in other books, or that he will go on to follow later on as well.

I think the class struggle is absolutely essential to the story, but I think Wells is also playing around with some other binaries in Western civilization or in Western thought there.

And I think that you can see the Eloy and the Morlock as representations of those as well.

So I mean one of the things that's really, really striking as well is the y he

lands in this Edenic heaven.

You know, he's in what appears to be the Garden of Eden.

The machines are all under you've got so you have this contrast on the one hand between the lush garden on the surface and the machines underneath.

So you have this nature culture, this nature society division being played out there,

which ties again into all kinds of questions that he's also beginning to ask about, well, what impact is civilization having on the way in which we understand humanity?

What impact is this kind of natural, sorry, what impact is this relaxed life that certain groups can now lead?

How is that blunting their efforts in the struggle for existence?

We're lucky enough to have many different versions of Time Machine before the one that was published in May of 95.

In earlier versions, Wells doesn't make the contrast so explicitly between the aristocrats and the working class.

The phrase he uses, I think fascinatingly, is that this is a contrast between aesthetes and Puritans.

And it's worth remembering that Time Machine is published the month of Oscar Wilde's trials.

The themes of aesthetics, of degeneration, of languor and social and natural corruption are all over the newspapers at this point.

And the bipolar quality of Wells's future is capturing not just biology, but also politics of the time.

Simon James, the time traveller, seems to be massively, massively, spectacularly ill-equipped for this job.

I mean, he's sitting at dinner, it doesn't change or anything.

He's obviously in some sort of, I presume, dinner jacket, he's smoking cigars, he's got a few matches in his pocket, which come in very handy.

As in colonial literature, you strike a match and people run away, that sort of stuff.

What do you think of the way that Wells presented him?

Well, I think he's a fascinating set of contradictions.

In fact,

he points out to himself he's most of the way through telling his own story when he says, maybe I should have brought a gun.

Perhaps a camera would have been a good idea.

Maybe I should have brought more matches than a single boxer.

And also as a reader, I think, well, yes, maybe you should too.

I think also he's a fascinating combination of

aesthete and technician himself.

When he says at the end,

treat my assertion of my story's truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest.

I think he's sounding like Oscar Wilde, that

he is this very bourgeois,

loosh traveller.

So in that sense, he's like the Eloy, but of course, he is also a technician.

He is science

as well as the arts and humanities as well, too.

So

he revolts against the Morlocks, but I wonder if he is, in a sense, part Morlock himself, too, because it's the Morlocks who work the machines.

Well, there's a sense of grandism about him, slightly like with Sherlock Holmes as well, these very well-educated men who are apart from the rest and can solve problems that the rest can't solve, but tend to do it on their own

in London in well-upholstered circumstances.

That's going on as well, isn't it?

Indeed.

I mean, the conversation starts with the discussion about maths.

He says, I want to tell you,

exactly.

It's a bit tougher, a best-selling.

You know, good evening, everyone.

I'm going to contradict the version of geometry that you were taught in schools.

Yeah, that's how it begins.

But it ties in, I think that's partly what the Sphinx is doing in there, too.

And which I think he gets from Bellamy, because Bellamy says that the riddle of the Sphinx in the 19th century, the hero of that novel falls asleep in the 19th century and awakes in the last year of the 20th.

He awakes in the year 2000.

He says the riddle of the Sphinx in the 19th century is the labour question.

And as Simon said, when the time traveller goes into the future and he sees the Sphinx in front of him, the riddle of the Sphinx, of course, in the play is what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, three legs in the evening.

And the answer is man.

The time traveller, as we've heard, wobbles on his time machine when Elians he falls off the time machine right at the beginning.

He's on four legs.

He then explores the future of 802701 on two legs.

And then, in the final section of the novel,

he has a crowbar, he has an iron bar that he wants to hit Morlocks with, too.

So he embodies the riddle of the Sphinx himself.

That he is.

On top of that, just to labour the point still further, at one point we're told

a nail in one of his dress shoes works itself loose and he finds himself limping, so that the time traveller becomes the Oedipal questter for knowledge in the future.

It's great, isn't it?

Mandarinese.

Would the first readers have seen it as a warning or as an accurate enough prediction or a bit of fun?

We've talked about the immense reaction, so what was the gist of the immense reaction?

It depends on whether or not you think that what he was trying to do was to predict the future or whether what he was trying to do was to give a warning about the present.

And we've heard that theme come through a little bit in the conversations that we've had thus far.

That it's less important

to get the science right and less important to get the future right, and more important to use the encounter with the potentialities of science, the potentialities of technology, to start thinking about the kind of choices that we as a society might choose to make, what we might choose to do with the knowledge that we have.

And it starts a whole theme within kind of that kind of speculative literature in which this kind of relationship between science and technology is actually put into actually into quite close tension.

A kind of series of sociological or speculative experiments with sociological organisation or cultural organisation.

It does seem to be very simplistic, the organisations he ends up with, isn't he?

Below ground, people are hacking away and trying to capture the up-ground people to eat.

Upground, they're wandering around eating strawberries, waiting to be caught, really.

Well, isn't that the mark of catastrophic literature in general?

Once you've wiped out the complexities of

advanced, she said, doing doing scare quotes.

That is, I think, really absolutely central to the point that Wells is trying to make about the role of the city and the role of civilization.

That essentially what it depends upon is complexity.

It depends upon an advanced system of the division of labour.

You know, all the the sociologists like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, they're all addressing the consequences of increasing specialisation.

They're doing it in very, very dry tones.

Wells is doing it in the language of the emotion, in a way that will actually get to the heart of things that his readers might care about in a way that they wouldn't necessarily care about reading a kind of a rather rather drier tone, even though granted we do begin with a let me tell you things you don't know about mathematics.

But what he's saying essentially is that the greatest achievement of humanity is civilization and the city is emblematic of that achievement.

The city is the icon of civilization but in the future the city is not there.

In the future the city is gone.

Why?

Because the greatest achievement of humanity contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.

It is Janus Faced and it's the Achilles' heel.

Modernity contains the seeds of its own destruction and can't possibly end well.

There's a very good example of this which we haven't mentioned so far, which is one of the places the time traveller visits in 802, 701, which is the Palace of Green Porcelain.

He comes across what is effectively South Kensington almost a million years from now,

this is a museum complex

which obviously begins to raise, both I think for the author and for the reader,

some reflection on the paradoxes of time.

Because what are you going to find

in a museum of the future?

You might, for example, it's always seemed to me perfectly plausible, you might find the time machine in a museum of the future.

It doesn't seem seem to cross the time traveller's mind to go and look for his own machine there.

What he finds is, exactly as Amanda has said, ruin.

Every single book in the vast library in the Palace of Green Porcelain is shredded.

Almost all the machines abandoned, rusted, useless.

Every monument, every achievement of urbanity has fallen to

and is now neglected.

So, rather, it seems to me than reading this as pure prediction, this is judgment.

This is warning.

This is without the kind of pressure that makes urbanity what it is,

this is what our future will be.

And it's no coincidence that it's best embodied in imagining a ruinous South Kent.

But he imagines more than that.

Simon James, it seems to me in the book that he presses the wrong lee.

He was in a hurry to get out.

He's going to be assassinated if he doesn't get out.

It's a near thing.

It's very exciting.

He bangs a lever.

Instead of going back home, he zips into the 30 million years ahead future, still, one presumes, beside the Thames.

And what does he find there that is eerie?

He finds the extinction of animal, or the near extinction of animal life on the earth.

He does notice when he visits the world of the Eloy and the Morlocks that there don't seem to be insects, that there don't seem to be weeds, that

the ecology of

the Thames,

the parts of London around the Thames,

have become much simpler, have become less complex.

And when he travels even further into the future, he's also dealing with the consequences of the impending heat death of the sun as well, too.

So he witnesses an eclipse in the future, so that

he sees the world around him become much, much darker.

So it's the moon passing between the earth and the sun.

But I think it also is a suggestion of the reminder that

even if we do try and fix our own society, that we try and remedy the social divisions that create the Eloy and the Morlocks, the energy that the Sun produces is finite and that mankind, no species can exist forever in the future.

Amanda.

Just to go back to something that Simon Schaffer was saying earlier, which had to do with

essentially the breakdown of civilization and the fact that all of these achievements of humanity, the acme of human creations, are now just so much done to dust.

And I think that

what's interesting here as well is the way in which that then gets developed

by later writers, like people like John Wyndham.

It's a theme that gets picked up very, very strongly in later science fiction.

This notion of the inevitable conflict between nature on the one hand and the city on the other, and the efforts made by the city to re by nature to reclaim the space of the cities.

Why does Wells leave the idea of truthfulness open?

He leaves it open at the end as is this true or not?

Is it a dream?

Have they been flummoxed by the time traveller?

Why do you think he leaves it like that?

Quickly for each of you, Simon, James, no.

Because I think he wants the possibility for the future that he has shown to be different

to be changed.

The narrator at the end, after the time traveller disappears, he goes back for another journey, and then we never see the time traveller again.

And we're just left with the possibility of an open future.

And the frame narrator says that the time traveller was a pessimist and he didn't think he thought that civilization was heading for a black future.

But the frame narrator himself concludes: if that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.

So we should try to make things better.

That that future is not written in ink, there is a chance for humanity to change it.

Simon.

Simon Shappa.

One of the striking things about Time Machine for us reading it now is that the time traveller doesn't go into the past.

This is a book about our possible future and therefore confessedly conjectural.

And Amanda?

Because it doesn't matter if it's true or not.

It doesn't matter if the story

is veridical in any sense.

What matters is the story and what matters is the warning contained within the story.

Well, thank you all very much.

Thank you, Monday Reese, Simon James, Simon Schaffer.

All suggestions for our listener week in by the 25th of October, please.

Next week, it's the poet Robert Robbie Burns, whose first collection, poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect, set him on the way to worldwide fame.

Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

That feels like five minutes.

It feels like we just got going.

No, it sounds like a dinner party in Richmond.

One question I have actually for you, Simon, is

what you think about Wells's relation with the aesthetic movement,

what is happening in fashionable writing at the time.

It's always struck me as perverse and fascinating.

So, for example, in the passage that we got onto towards the end, where Wells is evoking for us

what 30 million AD will be like, the idiom is the idiom of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde.

It's an idiom of languorous decay, of a kind of Japanese pastels as the sun slowly dies.

This is the degenerate side of the aesthetic movement.

Is that a criticism or an endorsement?

What's he doing?

I think he's engaging with it and eventually he absolutely turns against it.

So there's a moment in, there's a dinner party in the picture of Dorian Gray where someone uses the term fandasiecl and Lord Henry picks it up and says, fandasiecl fandu globe.

I wish it were fan du globe.

Life is a terrible disappointment.

So Wells can write in that language and he's engaging with it but he absolutely turns against art for art's sake.

And

key in my own work on Wells is the falling out that Wells has with Henry James 20 years after he writes The Time Machine.

That Wells has had 20 years of James patting him on the head and saying, Oh, you know, very good little Wells.

You know, it's a splendid book.

And eventually he thinks that asceticism is morally irresponsible.

He thinks that the novel is so important, you should use it as a vehicle of instruction to make the world better, and that art for art's sake leads to

the Eloy.

Another thing we didn't get onto, which I always find also fascinating, is um

Marxist critics in the nineteen thirties, like Christopher Caldwell, say, look,

the reason why the traveller gets on better with the Eloy

than he does with the Morlocks, and obviously feels admitted ambivalence, but basically sympathy for the Eloy and absolute loathing and detestation for the Morlocks, is because that is the predicament of the lower middle class.

That is the situation in which Wells' class, they say, finds himself.

Is that true?

Do you think?

I think there's a lot to be said for it, but it's not.

I mean, I suppose one of the, what I'd rather think about for the minute is that point that you raised before that.

The traveller doesn't go back in time.

And that's interesting for two reasons.

First of all, because when you think about the kind of time travel fiction that follows on from Wells,

the post-Eisenstinian time travel fiction is all about going back in time, paradoxes in time, how actions in the past change the present, therefore change the future.

But

the traveller's a tourist.

He doesn't do anything, just goes back, looks, goes, oh my goodness, and runs away very, very fast, as fast as he possibly can.

But Wells does get involved in prehistoric fiction a lot, a lot.

in prehistoric fiction.

And there's two examples that I'm thinking of,

but particularly the grizzly folk, this story that he writes about the encounter between Homo sapiens and Homo Neanderthalis at the dawn of time.

And the notion is that in this encounter, the Neanderthals nick a human kid and they eat it.

So you have this theme of two different kinds of humans

in inevitable conflict.

And with cannibalism...

the worst sin that a human can commit against each other, with cannibalism as the kind of, as

the mode of engagement.

Except it isn't cannibalism because they're not the same species.

Exactly, but that's the point though, isn't it?

But it's that failure to recognise the humanity in each other, which, again, you see it with your Eloy and the Morlock, and you see it, going back to the point about what is the class position of Wells and how does that then relate to the way in which he's depicting the Eloy and the Morlock, with that kind of the inability to look at somebody that looks different and to see in them

and to confer on them a recognition of their own essential humanity.

You raised, I mean, I'm not supposed to, I mean, my own rule about this is not to interfere, but as you raised the business about his quarrel with, a later quarrel with Henry James and the East Eats, was he considered to be a puppet success, but an outsider, or rather below the salt as far as

yes, very much so.

In fact, Wells, because of course he lived long into the 20th century, we tend to think of him as a Victorian Edward Wardian writer.

He died in 1946.

So we have the example I'm going to use, we have recordings of his voice.

Wells described himself as a cockney.

He said that he was never much of a success as a public speaker, and he was never very successful at going into public life because he had this squeaky, lower-class voice.

It certainly doesn't sound like that

if you hear that voice now.

I think also because of the poverty of his upbringing, too,

he thought he was shorter than he should have been.

In 1905, in Modern Utopia, he imagines the world as it should be made perfectly, and he meets the parallel universe version of H.G.

Wells, who is larger and more handsome than the real H.G.

Wells is because he's been fed properly when he's been grown up.

No, it is extraordinary how long Wells goes on.

He doesn't stop talking, writing, broadcasting, and so on.

This is someone who, after all, writes this story in its first version in 1888

and is broadcasting on Australian radio in 1938, 50 years later, explaining what the time machine really means.

So there's it always seems to me that there's a very strong sense in which

the reason why the figure of one reason, it's not the only reason, one reason why the figure of the time traveller is so constitutive of Wells is that he is that person.

He is this time traveller.

After all, he's capable, and more better than any other writer of his generation, of taking us to some other time.

And he treats fiction like that.

Does he?

Sorry, after you.

But it was, I mean,

one of my favourite HG broadcasts is one that he does in 1933.

And it's basically, it's a call for professors of foresight, and it is brilliant.

It is wonderful.

Essentially,

he's making a call

for the social value of science fiction, in that he's saying, up and down this country, we have thousands of professors and students of history all studying the past and not one not one professor of foresight and you know who he wants that who he thinks that professor of foresight ought to be it was look mate give us a job I could do with but but so he's calling for this this this professor of foresight because what he's trying to suggest what he's what he's arguing is in essence is that there is a there is a grand failure

of the public, of the democratic imagination to conceive of the kind of impact that science is going to have.

have.

It's really, really easy to imagine what the next scientific step might be or what's technological development.

It's easy to imagine or to speculate on scientific and technological development.

It is so much harder to figure out what the social consequences of those developments are going to be.

And that's why I personally love science fiction because that's exactly what they're doing.

They're doing applied sociology, they're doing applied history of science.

And they're doing it in a way that's much more successful

than the stuff that we write, I I think, in many ways, because it's putting it in the emotional context.

It's enabling people to feel what it would be like to be in that position, particularly in the kind of sharp divisions,

sharp divisions of the differential distribution of economic or intellectual power that Wells himself is experiencing as well.

And his heir, you know, John Wyndham, did exactly the same thing and made exactly the same set of calls.

But yeah, it's just an incredibly valuable.

Sorry, slight rant.

Are you talked out, or would you like to say some more?

The producer has not yet arrived.

He will

loom through that door in a minute.

You've got a minute or two.

Oh, he's looming.

So

just one more thing I wanted to say quickly, if that's all right.

Wells was obsessed with technologies of transport, and this is just the first one that Wells writes about space flight,

about the tanks,

the powered aeroplane, the helicopter.

People in them.

Before

they even exist.

But the first of them is The Time Machine, and we haven't mentioned the book's subtitle.

It's The Time Machine and Invention, which is a wonderful pun on the machine and the story together.

Thank you very much.

Simon.

And three Simons in all at the same time.

No, I said the world would come to an end if you had three Simons and

be more wealthy if you couldn't.

You could have a cup of tea or coffee first before that happens to me.

That would be lovely.

Tea.

Coffee.

Coffee?

Tea, please, if that's okay.

A fruit tea of some kind.

I think there was a ginger one or something like that, if that's okay.

We're also remembering Simon James, who passed away this summer and who, we're told, really enjoyed this recording.

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillardson, and it's a BBC Studios production.

I'm Rory Stewart, and I want to talk about heroes.

When I was a child, I imagined a heroic future for myself in which I would achieve great things and die sacrificing my life for a noble cause before I was 30.

But my experiences in the Middle East and in politics showed me that there was something deeply wrong with my idea of heroism.

From BBC Radio 4, my podcast, The Long History of Heroism, explores ideas of what it meant to be a hero through time.

How have these ideas changed?

Who are the heroes we need today?

Listen to Rory Stewart, The Long History of Heroism, first on BBC Sounds.

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