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The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man(1897) are now more than a century old. Yet they endure as literarytexts, radio plays, and movies, because they appeal directly to twoof our deepest desires: immortality and omnipotence. The timemachine would allow us to escape death and gain knowledge of thefate of the earth, while invisibility would enable us to go andcome as we please, under the noses of friends and enemies. At thesame time, both fictions show us the dangers of fulfilled wishes:The Time Traveller discovers the future of humanity is not brightbut hideously dark, while the Invisible Man drowns in the madnessbrought about by his own experimentation.

The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man
(1897) are now more than a century old. Yet they endure as literary
texts, radio plays, and movies, because they appeal directly to two
of our deepest desires: immortality and omnipotence. The time
machine would allow us to escape death and gain knowledge of the
fate of the earth, while invisibility would enable us to go and
come as we please, under the noses of friends and enemies. At the
same time, both fictions show us the dangers of fulfilled wishes:
The Time Traveller discovers the future of humanity is not bright
but hideously dark, while the Invisible Man drowns in the madness
brought about by his own experimentation. 
 
 
 
Of course, what Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) wanted to express
in these fantasies and what generations of readers have made of
them are two radically different things. Erroneously labeled
“science fiction,” and tricked out in their film versions with all
kinds of fanciful devices with flashing lights and ominous buzzers
Wells never mentions, they are really tales that enact the author’s
theories and speculations about human society, human nature, and
natural history in allegorical fashion. That is, the “science” in
Wells’s fictions is nothing more than stage machinery. But,
ironically, it is the machinery that has come to dominate our
collective imagination. 
 
 
 
There is nothing unique in this. Think of Gulliver’s Travels
(whose long-forgotten original title is Travels into Several
Remote Nations of the World), a book that Wells read as a boy
and reread throughout his life. In 1726 Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
satirized English political parties, religious quarrels, theories
of world government, and science, but his work was so grounded in
eighteenth-century British culture that today’s readers need
extensive preparation to fathom it. The story of Lemuel Gulliver’s
visits to lands populated by giants or intelligent horses has,
however, become a staple of children’s literature. The same applies
to Robinson Crusoe (1719), by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731). Only
scholars see the relationship between Crusoe’s shipwreck and
Defoe’s ideas on the fate of the middle classes during the
Restoration, when Charles II returned to England in 1660. Defoe’s
message and all his political intentions have been lost, but his
story endures as a wonderful demonstration of self-reliance. In the
literature of the United States, we have the example of Herman
Melville (1819–1891) and his Moby-Dick (1851): Most readers
learn about the ambiguous struggle between good and evil embedded
in the work long after they’ve read a novel about
nineteenth-century whaling and the strange characters engaged in
that dangerous work. 
 
 
 
Much the same has taken place with Wells’s Time Machine and
The Invisible Man. Wells cloaked his ideas about the future
of society and the role of science in the world so well that
readers simply do not see those issues and instead read his short
novels as examples of a kind of fiction based on the simplest of
propositions: “What if it were possible to travel through time by
means of a machine?” or “What if it were possible to make oneself
invisible?” In a world—one we share with Wells despite the fact
that more than a hundred years separates the moment he published
these two works from our own age—when scientists seem to make
discoveries every day, it requires no great leap of imagination, no
“willing suspension of disbelief,” to accept the basic premise of
each text. 
 
 
 
This is what differentiates Wells from Jules Verne (1828–1905),
author of Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1864) and
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Wells, in a 1934
preface to a collection of his early fictions comments on why they
are not comparable to Verne’s writings: 
 
These tales have been compared with the work of Jules Verne and
there was a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one
time to call me the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact there
is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory
inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies. His work
dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and
discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts. . . . But these
stories of mine . . . do not pretend to deal with possible things;
they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field.
They belong to a class of writing which includes the Golden Ass
of Apuleius, the True Histories of Lucian, Peter
Schlemil, and the story of Frankenstein. . . . They are
all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility;
they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets
in a good gripping dream (The Complete Science Fiction Treasury
of H. G. Wells). 
 
Wells links himself to a tradition, but at the same time he
misleads the reader. It is true, as he says in the same preface,
that “The invention is nothing in itself,” by which he means that
the applied science of Verne is of no interest in his kind of tale.
It is also the reason why rediscoveries of Verne, especially films,
are always set in the past: His projections became fact very
quickly. By the same token, this explains why Wells’s inventions
and their ramifications will always be modern.

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The Time Machine / The Invisible Man

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