The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells · first published 1895
12% recommend88% neutral
The Time Traveller, a dreamer obsessed with traveling through time, builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future. He lands in the year 802701: the world has been transformed by a society living in apparent harmony and bliss, but as the Traveler stays in the future he discovers a hidden barbaric and depraved subterranean class. Wells's transparent commentary on the capitalist society was an instant bestseller and launched the time-travel genre.
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Fiction: - The Time Machine (still holds up very well, and seems strangely eerie and prescient in places)... (H. G. Wells) - Dune (Frank Herbert) - The Hobbit (and LotR) (Tolkien) - Neuromancer (William Gibson) - Idoru, All…
on “Ask YC: favorite books” ↗…it's over 90%. You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try, say, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Grapes of Wrath, The Time Machine, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Foundation series, anything by Ray Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.
on “novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels” ↗I don't know if I really even believe in the idea of "must read" books, but here are at least a few I highly recommend. In no particular order. FICTION The Mysterious Island - Verne The Time Machine - Wells Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury Brave New World - Huxley Snow Crash - Stephenson The Shockwave Rider - Brunner The Fountainhead - Rand Cryptonomicon - Stephenson…
on “Ask HN: What are some must read books?” ↗You just described the plot of The Time Machine by H G Wells. I also recommend the movie (the original).
on “People's underestimation of AI” ↗…Who Would be King" that's a fairly well known film with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. His other short story books, such as The Jungle Book and Just So Stories - so much better than the Disney. The Time Machine and other Stories, H G Wells.
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books or essays written at least 100 years ago?” ↗…create it; ergo, if you don't know how to program you will be manipulated by others who can or at least have to live in a world they they've built. This analogy is old, e.g. Eloi vs. Marlocks in The Time Machine.
on “Douglas Rushkoff's book: Program or be Programmed” ↗Anyone else kept remembering H. G. Well's The Time Machine while reading the article?
on “Where Did Time Come From, and Why Does It Seem to Flow?” ↗1. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu 2. One L by Scott Turow 3. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu 4. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells 5. Believer: My Forty Years in Politics by David Axelrod 6. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells 7. Augustus: First Emperor of Rome by Adrian Goldsworthy 8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo…
on “Ask HN: What books have you read in the first half of 2016?” ↗…disorganized, vain, self-obsessed, subjugated. I bet you will have minimal difficulty envisioning every person you know and which track they're on. That's more of a 1000-year prediction than a 10-year one. The Time Machine predicted spinning "history rings" that produced sound (CD's), and Wells' other works were equally prescient considering they came from the 1800's. Morlocks and Eloi were dismissed as simply wrong, but…
on “Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 10 years for our daily lives?” ↗I think that was more of a minor plot point to move the story along rather than the real message. Judge just took a common theme, probably popularized in The Time Machine (The HG Wells book, not the ride in the film), to get us from point A to Point B quickly. After all, it was such a small part of the movie compared to how much time was spent focusing on lowest common…
on “Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future” ↗…world well. They foolishly imagine that after they run the world into the ground they can handily escape the consequences of their actions and only the little people will really suffer because of it. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was published in 1895. The crux of the plot is that "in the dystopian future, the descendants of hard working servants will be eating the sheeple descendants of the helpless rich." (a message…
on “Doomsday prepping – Disaster planning for less crazy folk (2016)” ↗…previous Tolkein to inspire him, and their motivations were completely different. Go further back to authors like H.G. Wells, and most of the characters didn't even have names (War of the Worlds and The Time Machine had very few named characters, for instance).
on “Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015)” ↗I’ve read a fair amount of both, and I think that James is definitely the superior prose stylist. Wells has an interest in social structures that informs a great deal of his plots (especially (The Time Machine). They’re in many ways incomparable if only because their literary projects have very different aims.
on “Henry James and H.G. Wells (1958)” ↗…movies started in 1972 with Silent Running.[1] That was the first "grubby future" Hollywood movie, and is an obscure but notable milestone in cinema history. There was early dystopian SF. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine ends with a dystopia. E. M. Foester's The Machine Stops (1909) was way, way ahead of its time. Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes…
on “Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future” ↗…fiction. Frankenstein is considered by many to be among the first science fiction books and is essentially a Black Mirror story from the 1800's. You had HG Wells and War of the Worlds for example. The Time Machine by HG Wells also portrays a possible negative vision for humanity based on an extrapolation of the social trends of the time. Look at Asimov's robot stories. The orignal "robot" story was not from Asimov…
on “Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future” ↗