
The Time Machine
- 120 pages · about 2 hours
- First published 1895
- 1,146 editions
- Free to read
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
The Time Traveller, a dreamer obsessed with traveling through time, builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future.
He lands in the year 802701: the world has been transformed by a society living in apparent harmony and bliss, but as the Traveler stays in the future he discovers a hidden barbaric and depraved subterranean class. Wells's transparent commentary on the capitalist society was an instant bestseller and launched the time-travel genre.
- Classics
- Science fiction
- Dystopian fiction
- Adventure
- Comics & graphic novels, science fiction
- Scientists
- Space warfare
- Time travel
2 What to expect
A short Victorian novella in which an inventor tells his dinner guests about his journey to the year 802,701, where humanity has split into two species. It is an adventure with a dark argument underneath, about class division and where progress might lead. The frame of a tale told after dinner keeps it brisk, and its picture of the far future is bleak and strange.
Good for readers who want: classic science fiction, time travel, and a short read with big ideas.
3 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive4 About H. G. Wells
5 More by H. G. Wells
6 Similar books
- Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
- Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline
- Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
- The Scorch Trials by James Dashner
- The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
- The 5th Wave by Richard Yancey
- Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson
