H. G. Wells' Time Machine

The Time Traveller throws his lever, and the laboratory dissolves into grey — day and night beating like a pulse, the sun streaking into a band of fire, the years falling away by the thousand. When the machine stops he stands in the year 802,701, among the gentle, idle Eloi who dance in the ruins of paradise, and the pale Morlocks who tend the machines below and climb, in the dark, to feed. This is the seed from which every tale of time travel grew: one Victorian evening's fireside account of a fourth dimension a man might walk down. At its centre stands H. G. Wells's slim 1895 romance, complete in itself. Around it has grown a long canopy of retellings — abridged and illustrated editions that carry the Eloi and Morlocks to younger readers, shaped by hands such as Betty Ren Wright and Chris Sasaki — and a strand of homage that treats Wells's invention as fact: Karl Alexander's Time After Time, in which Wells himself pursues Jack the Ripper through his own machine into a startled modern age, and David J. Lake's return to the Morlock world. It is honestly one work and its echoes, not a saga of equals. What lingers is the cool, reasoning voice of a gentleman-scientist watching wonder curdle into dread — for the machine does not stop at 802,701, but runs on to a still shore beneath a swollen, dying sun. Begin where all of it begins: with Wells's original. It is short, it is whole, and nothing after it is required.