Some Context
Throughout my short lifetime up to this point, I have really only ever read one full book before this one. I can't pinpoint the exact reasonings for this, but throughout my time in school I often used book summarization sites or just skimmed specific chapters to finish assignments. This was a bad thing, and I tried to give literature another go.
I finished this book on April 11, 2022.
Review
I picked this book up because I absolutely love the concept of time travel, and often find myself enjoying pieces of media that explore time travel in interesting ways. A few examples of this are Dark, Steins;gate, and 12 Monkeys.
As the so called "father of the time machine", I wanted to read H.G. Well's innovative book about it. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that time travel in the book was simply a literary tool to get him to the environment where he wanted to tell his story. The book didn't explore the idea of time travel other than a few chapters of extremely expressive observations of the visual experiences about traveling through time. Perhaps I am too new a reader to appreactiate these chapters, but nevertheless I found them a bit boring. No exploration of causality, paradoxes, etc. were in the book, which I found a bit disappointing.
The core of the book was the slow discovery of the "Eloi" and "Morlocks", descendants of the human race split into two, and the travelers interactions with them and the world they inhabit. The traveler's prescription on how the two evolved to be different was most likely derived from Well's personal political affiliations with the socialist party of his time. The traveler believed that the Eloi used to be an aristocracy, who forced the Morlocks into a life of labor in underground facilities with the purpose to provide the Eloi with resources to live without lifting a finger. Through centuries of evolution with this static structure, the Eloi degenerated into stupid, uninnovative, and weak beings that couldn't provide for themselves and had lost all creativity of man. I had hoped that once we discovered the Morlocks in the story, they would be in contrast with the Eloi; some sort of cruel, calculating, and intelligent society. Unfortunately, they were nothing such, and were seemingly inhuman, violent, and dull. I felt like the common observation of them was similar to an albino gorilla mixed with a spider. This left almost nobody to explain or explore the reasonings behind how the world came to be other than the traveler's own assumptions.
To continue off of this, there was almost no real explanation as to how the world came to be this way, and although this is a fictional world, it would have been nice to have some sort of direct evidence or explanation on how that world came to be. There came a point in the book when the traveler and Weena discovered a green porcelain museum filled with machinery and some worn artifacts from the past. I had hoped this would have been a point in the book where they would have found some books, or historical monumenents that would have explained, atleast it part, some of the events that had happened to have lead to this future. Nothing of the sort happened.
His depature from the future was also quick and unimportant, as the build-up for his grand plan to seize his time machine back from the Morlocks was completely extinguished as they had left the Sphinx door open giving him straight access to it, which he successfully used to escape.