Monday, January 22, 2007
Blog 1-The Time Machine
This is the first book I have read by H. G. Wells and I loved it! While the idea of traveling through time is exciting, the portrait Wells paints of humanity is bleak, to say the least. Section 5, I found to be most interesting; the Time Traveler's speculation as to how humanity has come to be this way in the year 802,701 A. D. "That Man has not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upperworld were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir ro all the ages." H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: Penguin Group, 2005), 46. What he goes on to describe is how the gap between the upper and working classes has eventually widened into seperate creatures, living in two seperate realms of the earth. This got me to thinking about the question that was posed in class last Thursday; What will become of the Upper class/Humanity when everything is done for us? A few thought that it would give humanity time to continue with great thinking, with art....Wells seems to see the upper class becoming "fatted cattle". (Wells, 62). The thought of humanity becoming useless scares me.
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Good morning Anne, Wells would be very happy that he scared you about his possible sceenario of the future of humanity. That was, in part what he was trying to do with this work. To raise the alarm, to raise our awareness of the dangers that he saw in technology and industrialization. I know most of Well's works only through movies, with the exception of The Time Machine. I do not think he was a pessimist about the future but was indeed concerned about how it might go instead.
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