Behind the Book: The Time Machine

I’ve read The Time Machine six times. I know it well enough to know exactly what’s missing from it.

Every Wells book I’ve read does the same thing: the manifesto comes first and the story is the wrapping. In The Time Machine the Eloi are the idle rich and the Morlocks are the exploited workers who eventually turn on them, and Wells never intended any of it to be subtle.

I love Wells for the idea and what he did with it has always annoyed me. He had the best premise in the genre, a man who can go anywhere in time, and he spent it on a lecture. Every time I reread it I wanted somebody in that machine to argue with him.

As political argument it works. As a novel it leaves you hungry, because the Time Traveller has no interior life worth examining, nobody to talk to, and nothing at stake beyond the abstract fate of humanity. He loses Weena. He goes home. The end. That’s a pamphlet with a plot attached.

So I started where I always start, with the things that aren’t in it. His future is populated entirely by the descendants of white Englishmen. That tells you something about who Wells imagined had a future at all. And his Time Traveller travels alone.

Why does The Time Machine not survive a modern reading?

Because what it had to say was about its own moment, and that moment is gone.

Parts of it are patently ridiculous now. Submit it today as a new novel and it would be ignored.

The prose would hold up fine. The argument it exists to make no longer connects to anything a reader is living through, and I think that’s the fate of every book written to win a debate: when the debate ends, the book goes with it.

The other problem is who Wells imagined had a future. His future is populated entirely by the descendants of white Englishmen, and there are no women in it worth mentioning. I find stories more interesting when they’re more various, because other cultures and histories see things a homogenous group can’t see. The standard I hold this against is The Expanse, seasons one through three, where every character carries a background and a set of loyalties and the story is only that story because those particular people are in it.

Why does the Time Traveller need a companion?

Because a man alone in a machine can only narrate. Wells sends him forward by himself, so the middle of the book is a single voice describing things. There’s no argument, no disagreement, nobody to be wrong in front of, and no second reading of anything he sees.

Give him somebody and the same trip produces banter, friction, a little romance, and two accounts of every stop instead of one. It becomes close to a buddy book, and I’d take a buddy book over a lonely man narrating to himself every time.

Nothing about the machine or the destinations had to change. Only the number of people in the seat.

What new characters appear in this retelling of The Time Machine?

A Russian woman who isn’t in Wells, and who took the book over. She started as a passenger and became the person running the expedition. Managing the provisions, reading the machine’s routing patterns, keeping Victor alive through the physical cost of the transits, and writing the twelve notebooks that make the journey a record.

She has a past and a scar and a way of seeing that the novel needed and couldn’t have got from anyone else. What she chose to look at turned out to be the point, and I loved writing her more than anyone else in the book. I didn’t plan any of that. She came in because the Time Traveller needed somebody to talk to and then became something else.

Who is Pieter the mouse?

A stowaway who got into the machine through a crack in the wall, the way mice do. He was a prop at first. Then he became a character, the way animals do when you pay attention to them. He knows things before Victor does, and he moves to Tatiana’s side of the machine before there’s any reason to.

I had a cat named Buttercup who used to run to my late wife’s room and demand attention whenever she was about to have an asthma attack serious enough to need medical intervention. Animals are smarter than most people think, and they carry things people don’t credit them with carrying.

Pieter is in the book because of Buttercup.

Why does the machine start talking?

Because of where it’s been, and it isn’t magic.

By the 2093 stop in the Saharan Solar Belt, Victor is traveling through a world saturated with information, and the machine’s displacement field sits active inside that infrastructure for hours at a time.

It starts adding words. By the end of the journey it speaks in full sentences. That’s what happens when a sufficiently complex system takes in enough input over enough time. I find it more interesting than a machine that simply goes.

What happens to Wells’s ending?

It’s gone, because I’ve always thought it was lame.

The Morlocks, the crab creatures, the dying sun on the beach. It’s us against them delivered as spectacle, and it’s the manifesto arriving on schedule. This version goes considerably further. The stops run from Oxford in 1895 through St Petersburg in 1905, Verdun in 1918, Hiroshima in 1945, and on past ten thousand years, five million, a hundred million, and out to a billion.

Some of those chapters are difficult, and they should be. A time traveler who only visits pleasant futures is a tourist, and I had no interest in writing a tourist.

Why is there a Hiroshima chapter in The Time Machine?

Because a journey through human history that skips it isn’t a journey through human history.

I should say where I stand, since the chapter exists and readers will want to know. There are people who believe the bombs shouldn’t have been dropped and I understand the argument. I disagree with it. The alternative wasn’t simply a land invasion, though that alone would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives on all sides. It was also the naval blockade that was already starving the Japanese civilian population, the imminent Soviet invasion from the north, and the deaths of Japanese soldiers stranded across the Pacific on islands with no supply ships coming and no way home.

The bombs ended the war in days. Without them, historians estimate the total death toll from all of those continuing catastrophes would have been measured in millions.

I’m not relitigating that history in the novel. What I wanted was to show a horror from a Victorian viewpoint, a man who understands what he’s looking at medically and can’t process it any other way, and to do it without looking away.

Tatiana stays in the machine. Victor doesn’t. That difference is the chapter.

Why is The Time Machine subtitled The Cure?

Because Victor is looking for something specific. His wife Catherine died of an illness that his physician friend Edmund Hartley attended, did everything possible for, and couldn’t stop. Hartley stayed anyway, because staying is what a physician does, and in the five years since he and Victor have never spoken about it directly. They’ve spoken around it. Victor tells the dinner party that he decided something on the morning she died. Not dramatically. He’d build a machine that moved through time, go forward until he found the cure, and come back with it. That’s a motive Wells never gives his traveler and it changes every stop on the journey. A man surveying the future asks what a place is like. A man looking for a cure asks whether they have it here.

What does Tatiana Volkova look for instead?

Everything else, and that turns out to be the book.

Victor looked for the cure. Tatiana looked at what was around it, and what she chose to look at makes the journey mean something beyond one man and one dead woman. She carries a sketchbook and has always carried one. She has a scar running the full left side of her face from hairline to chin, passing over an eye it didn’t take. Somehow that’s worse than if it had. The detail I like best about her is the smallest. Nobody in that dining room had ever asked about the scar, and she had the bearing of a woman who decided long ago exactly how she’d answer the question and was mildly disappointed that nobody ever put it to her.

Why keep Wells’s dinner party?

Because it already worked, and the friends are the part I could improve.

The invitations go out on a Monday with no explanation.

Just dinner, Thursday, seven o’clock. They come because they always come, and because five years of watching the light burn in Victor’s laboratory at two in the morning has made them careful about the invitations he does issue. When Victor issues one it means something is happening.

Eleanor Whitmore arrives first, dressed properly, and stops in the doorway because Victor is already seated. In eleven years and roughly forty dinners in that house she’s never once arrived to find him at the table. He’s always late, always trailing apologies he doesn’t mean, always with something on his hands that won’t quite wash off.

Tonight he’s clean-shaven, still, hands folded, looking at the far wall like a man who has been somewhere and come back with a great deal to say.

Wells gives you a room of listeners. This gives you people who have known each other long enough to hear what isn’t being said.

How far does the journey go in The Time Machine?

A billion years forward, and once backward.

The stops run from Oxford in 1895 through St Petersburg in 1905, Verdun in 1918, Hiroshima in 1945, Houston in 1969, Geneva in 1979, and Mumbai in 2021. Then out past the near future into the Bengal coast at 2057, the Saharan solar belt at 2093, the Andes at 2200, central Australia at 2400.

Then the numbers stop behaving like history. Ten thousand years. Fifty thousand. Two hundred and fifty thousand. The former Mediterranean basin at five million. The Cretaceous, roughly a hundred million years before any of it. A monument in northern Africa at five hundred million. And then a billion, which the book calls the end of the forward. Wells stopped at the dying sun on a beach. This carries on until stopping means something.

How much of The Time Machine is Wells and how much is invented?

The bones are Wells’s. The machine, the dinner party, the far future, the dying sun.

I kept the frame deliberately. The dinner party, the testimony, and the friends who have to decide what to believe already worked, and it was already there. What I changed is who’s at the table, so that Victor’s friends have lives and histories and the gravity of people who have known each other long enough to hear what isn’t being said.

Everything else is mine.

My own books are mostly my proof that I can write, and writing them is something close to a hobby I love. This one mattered to me more than most, because Wells left a great machine sitting in a room with nobody to talk to, and it bothered me every time I read it. I think the classic deserved better than a pamphlet, and I’m proud of what it became once somebody climbed in beside him.

From the author

The Time Machine
Victor builds the machine because his wife is dying and the cure has to be somewhere ahead. My retelling follows him through thirty stops across five hundred million years.

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