The Time Machine

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas explored in HG Wells’ novella, published in 1895, in which the Time Traveller moves forward to 802,701 AD. There he finds humanity has evolved into the Eloi and Morlocks, where the Eloi are small but leisured fruitarians and the Morlocks live below ground, carry out the work and have a different diet. Escaping the Morlocks, he travels millions of years into the future, where the environment no longer supports humanity.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Simon Schaffer 24 episodes
  Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University
• Amanda Rees No other episodes
  Historian of science at the University of York
• Simon James No other episodes
  Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University

Reading list

• Evolution
  Stephen Baxter (Gollancz, 2003) Google Books →
• The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances
  Bernard Bergonzi (Manchester University Press, 1961) Google Books →
• H. G. Wells' Perennial Time Machine
  Daniele Chatelaine, Patrick Parrinder and George Slusser (eds.) (University of Georgia Press, 2016)
• Time Travel: A History
  James Gleick (Fourth Estate, 2017) Google Books →
• The Future as Nightmare: HG Wells and the Anti-Utopians
  Mark Hillegas (Oxford University Press, 1967) Google Books →
• The Early Fiction of H G Wells: Fantasies of Science
  Steven McLean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Google Books →
• Shadows of the Future: H G Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy
  Patrick Parrinder (Syracuse University Press, 1996) Google Books →
• Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science
  Amanda Rees and Iwan Rhys Morus (University of Chicago Press, 2019) Google Books →
• A History of Science Fiction
  Adam Roberts (Palgrave, 2005) Google Books →
• H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life
  Michael Sherborne (Peter Owen, 2010) Google Books →
• The Time Traveller's Almanac: The Ultimate Treasury of Time Travel Fiction
  Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Head of Zeus, 2018)
• Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain
  H. G. Wells (H. G. Wells Library, 2016) Google Books →
• The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H.G.Wells' Scientific Romance with Introduction and Notes
  H. G. Wells (ed. Harry Geduld) (Indiana University Press, 1987) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0009bmf

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009bmf

Auto-category: 823.912 (Science fiction literature)