YMMV / The Time Machine

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Pretty much stated directly in the book. Are the Morlocks really monsters? Or the last true vestige of humanity, caring for and consuming herd animals just like people do today?
• Genius Bonus: The "hopping thing" in the darkest, most dismal future that the Time Traveler visits is, by logical deduction, simultaneously an homage to and a refutation of an earlier (satirical) article that Wells had done hypothesizing about humanity's ultimate fate. In that article, he had imagined humanity's anatomy dwindling to the simplest, most basic arrangement of organs needed for life, until ultimately it arrived at a point where humans were just a brain and a hand, relying on artificial means to support themselves rather than the messy business of biological ingestion, locomotion, etc. The "hopping thing" is the complete opposite, and represents mankind's evolution in a similar manner, but "devolving" into the most basic thing needed to survive: a ravenous, ambulatory digestive organ that simply consumes whatever it encounters, a "stomach with a foot", as it were.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One copy of the book from the 1970's advertises on the cover, "The Science Fiction Masterpiece That Predicted the Rise of the Flower Children!"
  • The race that ultimately succeeds humanity as a sapient species are giant sapient crabs, which resembles some of the internet memes about carcinisation.
• Older Than They Think: While there have been Time Travel stories since antiquity, this novel is credited to creating the literary concept of the time machine, a vehicle that enables an operator to go into the past or the future purposefully and selectively. However, this conception is wrong: the first time machine in literature actually debuted in the Spanish writer Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's novel El anacronópete, released eight whole years before Wells wrote The Time Machine.

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