H. G. Wells 1 hr 45 min read

The book that gave us the phrase, and the very idea of a machine to ride through the years.

A Victorian inventor builds a device to travel through time and hurtles forward to the year 802,701, where humanity has split into two species and the comfortable certainties of his age have curdled into something stranger and sadder. Wells more or less invents time-travel fiction here, but the real payload is social: the gentle, childlike Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks are a parable about class, leisure, and where industrial England might be heading. Short, propulsive, and startlingly modern for 1895, this is the seed from which a century of the genre grew. Read it to meet the origin of an idea you already know by heart.

In its time

Published in 1895, during the 1890s, wells arrives.

Reading it

1 hr 45 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).