The Time Machine is your seminal time-traveler book, and after all this time, it's still a good one. Eight hundred thousand years in the future, Wells makes it very plain that the earth is very hot. Did Mercury crash into the sun, as Wells suggests? Or, was it…GLOBAL WARMING? How very prescient.
I didn't really get into the storyline with the good, moron Smurfs and the underground, cannibal Smurfs. Seemed like Wells was trying to make an evolutionary point on class structure in England at the turn of the last century. Good for him.
Who really thinks the world will still be going eight hundred thousand years from now? Don't we expect Jesus to come back at some point? Or at the very least, won't we use up all the earth's resources or blow ourselves up?
More interesting to me was the main character's trip to the end of time. That kind of cosmic viewpoint helps one put life, the universe and everything in perspective, giant mutant crabs not withstanding.
The Time Machine is a humorous and engaging little work. The funny thing is, in over a hundred years of science and literature, time travel is one plot device that few people have done better at.
