"The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells (published 1895)

The first line in the Epilogue of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) is as follows: "One cannot choose, but wonder." Other than how apt a reflection of the Time Traveller's story as well as the main narrator's and how humble an acceptance, how gracious a plea this is, it is also a main marker of the kind of science fiction I enjoy: whether or not one is presented with proven fact is not the issue. The issue is rather thinking and moreover, wondering what's become and what is to become of the story itself.

This particular classic novella of science fiction begins with a request: that the Time Traveller's companions; the Medical Man, the Editor, the Psychologist, the Very Young Man, the Journalist, the Silent Man, and our narrator listen to the Time Traveller's story - with no interruptions - hear him out as if he were a professional storyteller indeed. The Time Traveller cares not whether they believe him but it is clear that he wants to tell it... as he says, "Badly."

The Time Traveller hardly believes his own experiences himself. On a time machine that he built, he travels from Victorian England forward through time until he reaches the year 807, 700. After sitting on the machine through a space/time continuum watching his surroundings change and move through epochs and eras described from Wells' supreme imagination (quite psychedelic, of you ask me, in terms of the expansion and contraction of the idea of time itself, not so much aesthetically as "we" know it from '60 - '70s American "groovy" culture but more like BBC's Planet Earth at high speed then slow motion and with fantastic creatures never before seen), he arrives in a sunny, bright Earthy place occupied by harmless and simple creatures who called themselves Eloi.

It is through the Time Traveller's trepidation towards the Eloi and in his wariness of observing and studying them (apart from, say, an Anthropologist) that we see how Wells' writing captures the intensity of shock, a sensorial kind of culture shock, that makes this tale believable and especially more resonant in our era of the conception of "Others" and "otherness" (philosophically linked to the philosopher Husserl). Science fiction is known for this element, but I like how it is conveyed in Wells'  articulation:

"A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some toy. The dinner and my conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all those who had surrounded me at first were gone. It is odd, too, how speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through the portal into the sunlit world again so soon as my hunger was satisfied. I was continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices."

He theorizes about them as the days pass, not so much as a scientist per se but for no other reason than not being able to help it: he lives in close quarters and proximity to them and there is no getting away from noticing routines and schedules, characteristics and personalities. When one day he watched them bathe he saw one female of the group begin to drown. He waited and realized that not a one of the others cared, and so he himself stripped down and saved her. From that day forward the Eloi, named Weena, followed him incessantly and fawned over him, quite like a child in the Time Traveller's own words. In her he recognizes humanity once again, in her sentiments and loving actions (sticking flowers in his pockets, for one), and after witnessing her cry is convinced of her tie to the human race as a descendant, albeit a "small-minded" one (for lack of a better word).

In the few days before the worst thing imaginable happens, the Time Traveller lets his mind fill to brink with theories of mankind:

"Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw! ... After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but, even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greatest number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favorite plants and animals - and how few they are - gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better... the whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating... in the end, wisely and carefully we shall adjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs... I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet..."

And the Time Traveller goes on and on in this fascinating yet extremely naïve way, trying to figure out how social and biological evolution had reached this perfect, peaceful stasis, in which the Earth's inhabitants had reached a certain flawless contended-ness so to not have any need for art or other similar endeavors. Now these premature thoughts, in essence similar to a substantive portion of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, come full circle through a seemingly contradictory dialectic once a certain revelation is exposed. In The Time Machine that revelation is expressed after the machine goes missing: who took it and why? It was not the Eloi but rather another segment of the world that the Time Traveller had previously not noticed (before there was the crisis of the missing machine). The discovery of an underground race (also descendants of humankind) called the Morlocks, pale white creatures (not fully described but considerably ghoulish and creepy) live in complete darkness far below the ground. Their one foe: light of any kind (via a flame or any other source; not just the sun like vampires). Their prey: the Eloi. Discovering this, the Time Traveller's musings on the evolution of society takes a turn, another turn, and still another:

"So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection - absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, then the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forgotten."

It is good here to note that H.G. Wells was criticized for propaganda and for being against the imperialist project of the Victorian Era, particularly because he was a self-proclaimed Socialist and perhaps it shows in his work. I have no sense of propaganda within these pages, but I just may be naive and fascinating by the words themselves and the structure of the dialectics of contradiction that emerge as the book progresses.

There is much more to say about the effect this might have for a reader's initial read. For example, on it's extremely visual nature, on its conceptions of the science of storytelling and function of belief, on it's metaphysical self consciousness (the book, while about a Time Machine, provides a textual example of a novel as time machine). However, as I've been writing, I'm come realize that Wells' book fascinates me most because of it's examples of how thought works in relation to it's environment  and experiences in which it finds itself, tying in an elaborate knotted bow of the marriage between ontology and epistemology of which I shall write about upon a second reading of this major work within the science fiction canon and tradition.