The Traveller's Discovery in Year 802,701
A Victorian inventor rides his machine to the year 802,701. He first finds the Eloi, small, childlike people who live idly among ruined palaces and fruit gardens, and reads them as a leisured utopia.
The Time Machine
4 ideas
Class Division Extrapolated Into Separate Species
If the gap between owners and laborers keeps widening, with workers pushed underground into factories and the rich sealed off in leisure, the two groups stop intermarrying and adapt to different environments until they become distinct species. The relationship then inverts: the pampered class loses all capacity to defend itself, and the laboring class, which still controls the machinery, becomes its keeper and predator.
Security Removes the Need for Intelligence
Strength and intelligence develop only as responses to hardship, danger and change. A society that achieves total comfort and safety removes the pressure that sustains those faculties, so its people drift toward feebleness, shallowness and dependency. Solving every problem therefore contains the seed of degeneration.
Time as a Traversable Fourth Dimension
Duration is treated as a fourth dimension of any real object, alongside length, breadth and thickness. We are carried along it passively only because our consciousness moves in one direction at a fixed rate. A mechanism that controls movement along that axis would let a person travel through time as deliberately as through space, which turns time travel from a dream or a piece of magic into an engineering proposition.