THE TIME MACHINE: AN INVENTION

At a dinner party in suburban London, the Time Traveller, known to the reader only as the Eminent Scientist, speaks to his guests about the fourth dimension of space--i.e. time. He states that it is possible to travel through time much as one travels through space. The guests are not persuaded, even after seeing the Eminent Scientist's time machine itself. At a later dinner party, the scientist arrives a little late, rumpled and dirty. He tells them he has spent the equivalent of eight days in the year 802,701. He encountered the Eloi, a race of delicate gentle vegetarians who exist in an idyllic garden, and the Morlocks, who live underground and operate the machinery and industrial equipment of the world. The Eloi, in other words are descendents of capitalism, and the Morlocks are the progeny of the proletariat. The Time Traveller then hurries into the year 30,000,000, where he sees a single life form--a round, tentacled thing near the ocean. He concludes that this represents the end of life on earth.