Since the very beginning, we have always had a selection of mass-market paperbacks (the pocket size paperback) in the store. For our eight years the price has always been the same, $1 each or 6 for $5. As these aren’t exactly a profitable commodity to deal in, we don’t spend any time keeping them organized. We put them up by the boxful, and welcome our customers to sort through them to find a cheap read, for the beach or wherever. There are always interesting books in the pile, and anyone can afford a buck. These days our mass-market section is two six-foot high bookcases jammed full and double-shelved.
Earlier this afternoon I decided I could fit another box of books into that section, and retrieved one from storage. In the course of unloading the contents of the box onto the shelves one slim volume caught my eye, and I set it aside. I first read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine when I was in grade school, and I think the edition that I found today was the very same one I read then. The one image that was indelibly seared into my memory from that first reading was the lonely seashore that the Time Traveler arrives to near the end of the book. At the time of that seashore visit the rotation of the Earth has ceased, human civilization is gone, hideous giants crabs roam the beach, the sun is a swollen red giant, and the end of the planet is apparently near. A bleak and frightening imagery.
Going through the book a second time today, I became reaquainted with the Eloi and the Morlocks. Arriving in the year 802,701, the Time Traveler discovers the descendants of the human race evolved into two species. The Time Traveler theorizes that the species was bifurcated as the natural evolutionary result of the development of the priveleged leisure class as seperate and distinct from the classes of industrial labor. In this future vision, the laboring classes evolve into subterranean creatures adapted to the darkness like cave creatures while the privileged have evolved into dim-witted effete little vegetarians. While the Eloi are apparently care-free, they actually serve as the meat for subterranean tables. Beware the darkness Eloi, the Morlocks are hungry.
The Time Machine was first published in 1895. It is easy enough to imagine how a nineteenth century Londoner could imagine such a future for the human race. Without even ever opening a history book, we all have an idea of what industrial England looked like if only from Dickens. Wells lived in a highly stratified society with an enormous labor class that struggled for survival in the mills, mines and factories while the upper class escaped the smoke and stink of the cities for estates in the countryside.
The Time Machine is considered to be the first true work of science fiction written in English, and Wells (along with Jules Verne) is considered to be one of the fathers of the genre. The very fact that we refer to time traveling devices as “time machines” is the result of this book, as Wells coined the term.
While in grade school and high school I read a bit of science fiction and fantasy, I no longer do. Finding that familiar cover today sparked a memory that made me want to reread a classic. Glad that I did.