Trivia / The Time Machine

• Creator Backlash: In 1931, Wells stated that the book was "a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks over it once more".
• Deleted Scene: A section from the eleventh chapter of the serial published in New Review was removed from the book. Certain time travel story anthologies tend to include it, though. A popular nickname for the section is "The Grey Man".
• Executive Meddling:
  • The section of text that was taken out from the book was suggested by Wells’ editor William Ernest Henley who wanted Wells to "oblige your editor" by lengthening the text with, among other things, an illustration of "the ultimate degeneracy" of humanity.
  • The author was forced to write and include an extra chapter, entitled "The Grey Man" to lengthen the story. This chapter is generally not included in modern publications of the story.
  • In an even more extreme example, a whole chapter titled "The Golden Age of Science", depicting a cold war in a technologically advanced future (and possibly the beginning of the Eloi-Morlock genesis) was written in the Great Illustrated Classics version; in a vain attempt to try to bring something, anything back from the future, the Time Traveler makes one last stop 200 years ahead of his home time, in a setting that he considered the Golden Age of Science. Upon arrival he winds up getting drugged and interrogated as it’s assumed he’s a spy, and when that gets cleared up he’s informed of the Cold War and one of his captors attempts to seize his machine when their enemy attacks once again, and he brains his attacker with a loose lever before escaping into the future again, with nothing to show for his efforts.
• Science Imitates Art: One genus of remipedes (centipede-like cave crustaceans) is named Morlockia, after cannibalistic post-human troglodytes of the book (because both live underground).
• Science Marches On:
  • The Time Traveler witnesses the Sun enter the red giant phase in only a few million years — modern projections estimate that it will take around 600 million years for the aging sun to destabilize simple photosynthesis, and then another 200 until life is no longer possible on Earth, and then another billion or so before it swells enough to start swallowing planets. This is addressed in Stephen Baxter's officially licensed sequel novel, The Time Ships, which posits the theory that the Sun going red giant billions of years ahead of schedule was due to accidental tampering done before the human race devolved into the Eloi and Morlocks.
  • In the future, all diseases have been eradicated, along with, apparently, the vast majority of bacteria and fungi promoting decay. Modern medicine has since recognized the development of immunity in bacteria and viruses, and the eradication of all disease seems all but impossible. Even then, new diseases would always crop up over the eons. How soil nutrients are replenished in the absence of normal decomposition is also never explained.
  • The extinction of pest animals, predators, insects, and a large portion of bacteria and fungi, is portrayed as a positive achievement of mankind, and overall a betterment of the planet. Nowadays, such a scenario would be associated with a massive extinction level event, and portrayed extremely negatively.
  • Similarly to the above, global warming is portrayed as an entirely positive thing.
  • The impact of evolution on humans and (in the farthest-future segments) arthropods are addressed, but plant evolution in the Eloi/Morlock era seems to have frozen in the state of a Utopian-future garden. Realistically, from the moment people ceased bothering to cultivate flowering plants for their aesthetic qualities, plant strains which favored production of additional seeds over elaborate blossoms should have out-competed their showy, yet slower-breeding rivals. Even in distant eras, weeds will still take over gardens that aren't tended.

---