Sara Ammar

In some ways, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is a ‘timeless’ text:

it continues to enjoy huge popularity (as witnessed by big film adaptations in 1960

and 2002, as well as the fact that the novel itself has never been out of print and is

available in a range of editions), it continues to exert a considerable influence on

the literature and cinema produced since, and its very narrative structure – with

much of the action of the novel taking place in a time that hasn’t happened yet, the

year 802,701 – in a sense absenting it from its own context.

The Time Machine can be read as Wells’s attempt to understand the meaning of

our existence in light of the theory of evolution, which had led many Victorians to

question their firm faith in God and therefore in a Christian understanding of

humanity’s purpose. If we’re not on Earth because God created us for his purpose,

then what are we doing here? Is our existence merely random? Are we mere

animals, albeit thinking ones? Partly what Wells is trying to do is examine the role

of man in the modern world.

He does this, I think, through several oblique references to the story of Oedipus,

the mythical King of Thebes who inadvertently fulfilled a prophecy which stated
he would kill his father and marry his mother. However, what is less well-known

in the Oedipus story is how Oedipus came to be King of Thebes in the first place:

namely, by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and, through doing so, freeing the city

of Thebes of its plague.

The Riddle which the Sphinx asked people, but which nobody else had managed to

solve until Oedipus came along, was the following question: ‘What goes on four

legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?’ The answer is

‘Man’, because humans crawl on all fours as babies, walk upright on two legs

during adulthood, and then use a walking-stick when they’re older.

would argue that Wells includes several references to Oedipus, and to the riddle he

solves, in The Time Machine. He refers to ‘the riddles of our own time’ in the

Epilogue (pointing up the fact that the Time Traveller’s journeys through time are

really in order to answer the questions of his own time, the 1890s), but also the

imposing presence of the ‘White Sphinx’ in the world of 802,701. (As if to invite

this analysis, the first edition of The Time Machine, published by Heinemann in

1895, carried an illustration of the Sphinx, on its title-page.)

Oedipus’ name literally means ‘swollen foot’, and the Time Traveller tells us that

‘I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful

at the heel’. There are also numerous references (made by the book’s narrator) to
the Time Traveller’s ‘lameness’ and the fact that when he returns to the present

day he is ‘limping’.

Is the Time Traveller a modern-day Oedipus, attempting to solve the riddle of man

– not over the course of one man’s lifetime (as Oedipus’ Sphinx had), but over the

course of the entire species? In many ways The Time Machine offers itself to us as

a modern myth for the scientific age: Oedipus among the machines.

This entails not just images of heat but images of light: one of the laws of physics

is that we cannot generate light without heat. Every artificial light-source we’ve yet

invented, from the incandescent light-bulb to strobe lighting or the laser, involves

generating heat in order to generate light. This heat-light relationship is one which

Wells, with his scientific training, would have known well.

Consider the many references to suns, fires, flames, and bright lights in The Time

Machine, such as the literal sunset and the way that it puts the Time Traveller in

mind of the metaphorical ‘sunset of mankind’, as well as the sunset of the far

future which the Time Traveller witnesses towards the end of the novella, and, let

us not forget, his trusty matches which he uses to keep the Morlocks at bay.

Even just in the first few pages of the book, we have the narrator’s reference to the

Time Traveller’s eyes which ‘twinkled’ (like a star?), his ‘flushed’ face, Filby’s

‘red hair’ (flame-haired, we might say), the ‘incandescent lights’, a very young
man attempting to light his cigar over a lamp, and the Medical Man ‘staring hard at

a coal in the fire’. Fire is everywhere in this short book.

But those matches are worth pondering. Man’s ability to create fire might be

considered the starting-point of his technological development, but it is also often

considered profane. Indeed, at the time of Wells’s novel a popular name for

matches was ‘lucifers’, from the Latin for ‘light-bearer’; Lucifer is also, aptly, the

Devil. For the Greeks, it was Prometheus who defied the gods by stealing fire from

them and giving it to man; he was punished by the gods for this.

A novel often considered the first science-fiction novel, Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), carries the subtitle The Modern Prometheus,

continuing this tradition of seeing scientific experimentation as a dangerous way of

playing God, and one that can only end in disaster. The Time Traveller’s matches

are a reminder of this Promethean undercurrent to much science fiction,

particularly in the nineteenth century when religion still played a more central part

in the Victorians’ everyday lives.

The war of the worlds

The story is told retrospectively by an unnamed narrator, an educated,

philosophically trained man who witnessed many of the events he describes and

reports them as recent history. The first signs of an invasion from Mars come when
astronomers note a series of spectacular explosions on the planet. Experts,

however, think they were caused by meteorites or volcanic eruptions; no one

suspects any danger. Only later does it become known that climatic changes

steadily had made Mars less hospitable for its inhabitants, and they were looking to

Earth as their only refuge. The explosions were the firing of ten projectiles, each

containing a small Martian invasion force, at Earth.

The first cylinder-shaped projectile lands southwest of London, on a summer night.

By morning, it has attracted a crowd of curious onlookers. In the early evening, the

cylinder opens to reveal a grotesque, octopus-like figure the size of a bear, its body

glistening like wet leather. The crowd retreats in shock. By dusk, an official

deputation arrives, waving a white flag. The authorities have decided that the

Martians are intelligent creatures and wish to communicate with them. A

devastating beam of heat shoots out from the invaders’ cylinder, destroying

everything it touches. Forty people lie dead, and the narrator flees in terror.

This sets the pattern for the next few days. The Martians appear to be unstoppable.

They construct huge tripod-shaped machines, higher than a house, within which

they sit, covered by a hood. The machines stride across the country, causing death

and destruction wherever they go. Military might is useless against them: Troops
and weapons are annihilated in large numbers. The narrator manages to escape the

deadly heat ray by diving into a river. He meets a curate who believes that the day

of judgment has come.

The narrative switches to London as the narrator tells of the experiences of his

brother. News is slow to reach the capital city, but when it does, it is grave: The

Martians are advancing on London and are releasing a poisonous black smoke that

suffocates everything in its path. There is no defense against it. The entire

population of London flees northward in a stampede of six million panic-stricken

people. The Martians take possession of the city, although they also suffer losses:

A warship rams and kills one Martian who has waded out to sea, and another

Martian is killed when the same ship explodes after being struck by the heat ray.

The narrator hides with the curate in an empty house to escape the black smoke.

Trapped for fifteen days by the presence of Martians outside, he observes them at

work and learns to his horror that they feed on human blood. The curate loses his

mind, and in a struggle, the narrator kills him. When he emerges from the house,

he realizes that humanity’s rule over Earth has ended, and he encounters an

artilleryman who has visionary ideas about what people must now do to survive.

The narrator makes his way to the deserted London, where he comes on a Martian

emitting a strange crying sound. He then stumbles on the remains of a dead

Martian; he soon finds fifty more. The Martians have died because they have no

resistance to Earth’s bacteria. The joyful news is telegraphed across the world, and

relief comes to the stricken city.

In War of the Worlds by H.G Wells, Martians from the planet mars land on earth in

silver cylinders. The narrator being among some of the first people to reach the

fields were the first silver cylinder landed quickly was immersed with excitement.

As human beings we regard ourselves as being the most intelligent mammal on the

planet, superior to all other creatures. In much of the way we envision Martians

being these intelligent creatures that in our minds would resemble human traits

because we are also superior creatures. But to the surprise of the narrator and all

the towns people the Martians were far from looking alike to humans.

The book shortly emphasizes the problem with the human race; we limit

ourselves by being anthropocentric. The fact that the narrator and towns people

believed that the Martians would have hands like humans shows how

anthropocentric we are. They approached the Martians cylinder with a white flag

once they had realized that the Martians did not resemble us, of course waving a

white flag again points to something a human would know. They keep doing things
that would only be known by humans. And because humans are the most evolved

mammal on planet earth to them it would only make sense that a Martian would

know what human gestures meant. They completely are oblivious of the fact that a

gesture known by humans does not necessarily need to be known to be an

intelligent alien.

The narrator first describes the Martians as “they were, I now saw the most

unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive”. But after observing them closer for a

period of time he sees why the Martians are how they are. Instead of hands the

narrators describes the Martians having tentacles and not having a body but were

merely heads. The narrator saw that although they were superior to humans they

lacked intelligence of what they were actually doing. They were these superior

creatures that like us were hurting humans. He sees that we are not so different

from the Martians and compares it to the colonization of Cortez, this superior race

among the Indians. And like the aliens we wiped out a race we believed to be

below us. The aliens had come to show us that we weren’t above them.

“Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish

intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being”. The

most important thought of the narrator. Of course they do not have these human

like features because they are increasingly intelligent at the sacrifice of their body.

He attributes having a body with having emotions, thus the narrator understands
the ethical reason behind their destruction and killing. They are higher in the

evolution scale, but with higher evolution they were striped of emotions. The

narrator throughout the rest of the book begins to see how the evolution of their

bodies affects their ethical decisions towards human beings. Being superior to the

human race for the aliens meant sacrificing what we can’t possibly do without, our

emotions.

References

Beaumont, M. (2006). Red Sphinx: Mechanics of the Uncanny in “The Time Machine.” Science
Fiction Studies, 33(2), 230–250. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241433

Philmus, R. M. (1969). “The Time Machine”: Or, The Fourth Dimension as Prophecy. PMLA,
84(3), 530–535. https://doi.org/10.2307/1261141

R. D. Mullen. (1993). The Definitive War of the Worlds [Review of A Critical Edition of the
War of the Worlds: H.G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, by D. Y. Hughes & H. M. Geduld].
Science Fiction Studies, 20(3), 440–443. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240284

Hughes, D. Y. (1979). Criticism in English of H.G. Wells’s Science Fiction: A Select Annotated
Bibliography. Science Fiction Studies, 6(3), 309–319. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4239288