Thursday, September 15, 2005

The 306 Greatest Books #40 - The Time Machine

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List. 


Similar to Frankenstein and Dracula, The Time Machine represents one of the world's earliest cases of science-fiction. Starting in a time when Jules Verne and other H.G. Wells classics were pushing the bounds of conventional fiction, The Time Machine shows us what Wells' view of the future might look like as his time traveler takes a machine into the future. The book is a very short and fast-paced, action story that is perfectly geared towards the geek in me. Fairly recently, from when the book was publish, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was introduced and this book incorporates the (then) modern day thinking on the Theory of Evolution. This shows that Wells was on the very cutting edge of society, taking new ideas and incorporating them into an already cutting edge story. Overall, this is a great book. The plot starts off fairly slow, but as it picks up, the story draws you in quite quickly. Wells does an amazing job of taking his modern day society and projecting what might happen with the human race several hundred thousand years in the future. He then proceeds beyond this to the end of the planet Earth all together. It is definitely a visionary work for its time and a must read.

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