LBST 2213/HTAS 2100: Science, Technology, and Society » October 22nd: The Time Machine

October 22nd: The Time Machine

Literature and Culture

Some of you might be puzzled when I claim that “science fiction” is an important genre that reflects our values regarding science and technology. Is all science fiction like this. To some extent, yes, but it’s not always obvious. Just like all stories, some science fiction texts are more entertaining than others. Likewise, don’t get annoyed that we aren’t explaining the validity of interstellar travel, locating the Roswell aliens, or learning Vulcan (although we might reference the theoretical possibility of time travel). Fans of this genre are probably not too keen on having the stories looked at from a cultural perspective because it “ruins” their experience. Critical thinking will do that–it’ll ruin you. It’s only temporary while you reinstrumentalize yourself. Want to learn how to reinstrumentalize yourself? Check out the anime show Neon Genesis Evangelion–that’s sci fi!

There are many ways to interpret Literature. If this were an English class, we’d be going over types of interpretation and applying them to a variety of texts. Alternatively, in an English class, we might focus on a few works from several authors and look for similarities in their novels, poems, or short stories. We’re reading science fiction in order to think about technology (and science) from humanistic and rhetorical perspectives. Because technologies are products of the time period from which they come (just as texts are), we can understand the rhetoric embedded into ideas about technology. Even though sci fi can be far fetched, it still reflects ideology. This genre has themes that reoccur and says much about the cultures from which they come and how we (today) might find similar meanings in the texts of our time.

If you have time (ha!), watch a video about time travel and science fiction. This isn’t required, but, if you’re interested in quantum mechanics, you might enjoy this.

The Time Machine (1895)

Here’s a little bit about Wells from my copy of The Time Machine (Bantam Books reissue, 1991). The editor mentions that Wells had a lifelong pursuit for the “ideal woman” with whom he could have “a perfect relationship.” Wells died in 1946, so he saw the horrors of WWI and WWII, and “throughout the 1930s he took center stage in warning that humankind was on the brink of disaster, while zealously planning the reconstruction of society.” He warned against the pursuit of technologies that would destroy humanity and lived to see the development of the atomic bomb.

When the novella came out (1895), the Western world was well into the Industrial Revolution and society was being ordered to maintain the economic machine and, therefore, maintain society. For today, let’s consider Wells’s imagination and the reasons someone might conceive of going forward (or back) in time. We’ll definitely get into how this text is a product of its culture (and, maybe, how the movie adaptations are of their respective time periods), but let’s focus on main features of this text and how you responded to it during your reading.

Consider the following themes in the novella:

  • Gathering around to smoke, drink, and discuss issues of time travel…who are these guys?
  • Narrator’s role in (re)telling the story
  • Escaping/transcending one’s time (and place)
  • Dealing with foreigners in a foreign land (and time)
  • The Time Traveller’s* motivations for leaving 1899

*This is Wells’s spelling: t-r-a-v-e-l-l-e-r. The double ‘l’ is chiefly a British variant, so, because Wells uses it, I’ll use it when we refer to his character.

More questions to consider:

  • Why go into the future?
  • What does the Time Traveller do when he gets to 802,701?
  • What does this following assumption say about his cultural frame of reference (his values):
    The work of ameliorating the conditions of life–the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure–had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw! (p. 37)
    • One possible interpretation is that he has the same assumption that we mainly have: technology and science always progress and solve problems.
    • He assumes humanity created utopia…
  • What is the understanding of knowledge in the book? Is knowledge power? A problem or burden? (p. 48)

Time Traveller’s Comments

The Time Traveller makes observations and extrapolates on how the Eloi-Morlock world/s came to be. Like many European intellectuals of his time, H. G. Wells theorized about the merits of socialism as an economic system. One reading of a socialist vision of the future is utopia–one day all the evils of the world will be solved. Is that unique to socialism? What other theories of society or just human speculations end with utopia?

Places where Wells mentions communism (let’s not worry about the distinction between “communism” and “socialism” for our purposes with this novella):

  • p. 7: “‘To discover a society,’ said I, ‘erected on a strictly communistic basis.'” One possible finding in the future.
  • p. 35: “‘Communism,’ said I to myself….Then, in a flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb….In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike.”
  • p. 60: “At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.
  • p. 61: “So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.”

Places where Wells mentions women’s and men’s roles:

  • p. 35: “for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete.” {italics mine}
  • Notice that Wells, definitely aware of the Women’s Suffrage Movement of the late-19th Century, extrapolates that women’s “traditional” roles appeared to be changing circa 1900.

Places where Wells mentions Science and Technological improvements–bettering human life with agriculture and medicine:

  • p. 38: “The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay.”
  • p. 37: “After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently..”
  • p. 37-38: A little way down, The Time Traveller explains his time’s agricultural artificial selection isn’t as vast as the Eloi–or so he assumes–because “our knowledge is very limited.”
    • p. 38: “Some day all this will be better organized, and still better.”
    • Remember, our ideology makes us believe new techniques, new technologies, and new scientific knowledge will increase in the future.

Quest for Knowledge

So how is the Time Traveller separated from the Eloi? His desire to know. On p. 64 he explains, “It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that drove me further and further afield in my exploring expeditions” to get to the Palace of Green Porcelain.

  • Why does the Time Traveller privilege knowledge?
    • For one thing, he’s a scientist, who conducts experiments.
    • He’s immersed in Western culture, which privileges the scientific method.

The Time Traveller’s Thoughts on What Happened to the Future

  •  p. 25: Question about (de-)evolution–“What if…the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?”
  • p. 37: “It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane….the sunset of mankind.”
  • p. 37: “The science of our time has attacked but a little department of our field of human disease, but, even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently.”
    • Remember, there’s a belief–a prevailing belief–that technology will improve and we’ll steadily establish new science.
    • Why do I keep bringing this up in the context of our class?
  • p. 47: Patience…lost on the Time Traveller–“I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours–that is another matter.”
    • I’d say this is more his being industrious than wanting instant gratification.
    • Occidental is a fancy way of saying Western as in Western Civilization.
    • While we’re on the subject of turn-of-the-last-century literature, the fancy French phrase for this time period (around 1900) is fin de siècle {pronounced: fan-dee-see-ahk-la}
  • p. 50: Compares discussing his time to the Eloi with comparing “his world” with foreigners from lesser-developed places.
  • p. 66: Modernist literary theme of science and technology cutting into nature: When the Time Traveller enters the Morlocks’ domain underground, “The air was full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft.”
  • p. 68: “I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances.”
    • Of course, he would have this assumption. Science and technology always advance, right?

Morlock Behavior and Evolution

  • p. 72: “Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and sunshine. And now that brother was coming back–changed!”
  • p. 77: Morlocks possibly ate “rats and such-like vermin. Even now [1895] man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was–far less than any monkey.”
  • p. 78: “I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attribute of mind was impossible.”
    • p. 78: “…the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy…”
    • They looked too much like him.
    • Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish Victorian-era philosopher, was vehemently opposed to noble heredity and thought aristocracy by birth wouldn’t result in the best leaders but would damage society.

The Problem with Utopia

  • p. 97: “No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quite followed.”
  • p. 97: “There is no intelligence where there is no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
    • What might Asimov say about this?

The Time Traveller eventual gets to the end of the Earth (the end of time?). Why did the Time Traveller disappear for 3 years?

  • How far ahead does he go?
  • p. 103: What type of creature (or creatures) does he find?
  • p. 106: “All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives…”

“Filby, an argumentative person with red hair…”

In the novella, Filby is just one of the observers, but in both versions of the movie, he’s a friend and mentor. The novella is mainly the narrator’s retelling of the Time Traveller’s story. Both the novella and the 1960’s film show science being discussed. Although time travel is just theoretical (is it?), the various men in the room contemplate the possibility of actually traveling through time. This is an important allegory to how science gets verified: new ideas must be vetted (tested and approved) by an established group–usually a discourse community. This “dinner party” is metaphoric in that the attendees vet the Time Traveller’s experiment.

Film Adaptations

I hope to have more clips from the 1960 and 2002 film adaptations of the Time Machine, but please watch these links below. There will be questions about these clips on Test 2 and the Final Exam.

Next Week

We’ll continue with H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) next week. Don’t forget to do your weekly discussion prompt before Friday, 10/23, at 11:00 pm.