The Time Machine was inventively written as a social critique of the
Victorian Era in 1895 by Herbert George Wells, the father of modern science fiction. Wells used the novel to get the messages across on social and political problems at the time when London was on top of the world. The novel criticized mainly on communism, imperialism, capitalism, as well as Social Darwinism. The Time Machine was an adventurous science fiction novel about a Time Traveler, the inventor of a time machine who traveled to the year 802,701 A.D. In the course of his journey, he saw the degeneration and the separation of mankind through the two evolved species, the Eloi and the Morlocks, in which their relationship and their significance would be explained in this essay. When the Time Machine landed in the future, the Elois were the first creature that the Time Traveler had come across. Their name was from the imitation of the word "Elite" and they were the evolved upper classes, the protagonist, who lived above the ground. The Elois were described as being beautiful, peaceful, and graceful. They had their own language in which the Time Traveler described as having "a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue," (Wells, 25). The Elois only lived on fruits since other kinds of cattle or animals became extinct after they ate each other. According to the Time Traveler, the Elois were small and weak as if they were suffering from tuberculosis. Even though the Eloi seemed to be careless and fearless during the day, they were afraid of the dark in which they called "Dark Night". Due to this, they had to stay together and sleep in groups especially at night. Physically, all of the Elois had curly hair, thin red lips, small chin, and big gentle eyes. The sight of the Elois reminded the Time
Traveler of communism, which was one of the themes in the novel,
Bibliography: Wells, H.G. "The Time Machine." London: J.M. Dent, 2002