The Time Machine - H.G. Wells

First published in 1895, The Time Machine is the novel that launched H. G. Wells' career and is widely regarded as the work that established time travel as a serious subject for fiction. The unnamed Time Traveller builds a machine that carries him far into the future, to the year 802,701 AD, where humanity has split into two very different descendants: the gentle, childlike Eloi living above ground, and the brutish, subterranean Morlocks who prey on them. When his machine goes missing, the Traveller must fight to recover it and return to his own era. Sharp, compact and endlessly influential, the novel is both a thrilling adventure and a meditation on class, evolution and the future of civilisation. This SF Masterworks edition (Gollancz, 2017, 144 pages) includes an introduction by Gwyneth Jones.