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The story begins in [[Victorian London]] with the nameless narrator talking to his equally nameless friends, among them the Time
The first thing he found there was the Eloi, peaceful child-like humanoids living an idyllic life. Once he's had enough time to muse on how they are the inevitable product of human evolution (for now humanity has technology it no longer needs intelligence) he discovers that the Eloi's apparent [[Sugar Bowl]] [[Utopia]] is closer to a [[Crap Saccharine World|crapsaccharine]] [[Dystopia]]. [[Beneath the Earth]] dwell Morlocks, bestial humanoids who prey on the Eloi.
The
After a succession of adventures, the
The story's vision of the future reflects Wells's [[Writer on Board|strong]] [[
The link in the first sentence will provide you with an online version of this classic (now in the [[Public Domain]] just about [[Offer Void in Nebraska|everywhere but Europe]]). You can also download the full text at [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/35 Project Gutenberg].
For the ''[[Choose Your Own Adventure]]'' series, see ''[[Time Machine Series]]''.
{{tropelist}}
== The Book ==
* [[An Aesop]]: Don't exploit working class, or their descendants will eat your descendants (which reflects Wells' socialist views)
* [[Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny]]: The Eloi appear to meet [[wikipedia:ADHD predominantly inattentive|DSM criteria for inattentive ADHD]]
{{quote|
* [[Beneath the Earth]]:
* [[Crying Wolf]]: One reason the Time
* [[
* [[Dystopia]]
* [[Elves vs. Dwarves]]: The Eloi and the Morlocks, of course.
* [[Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"]]:
** This is even [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] early one character asks "Where's -----?", referring to the Time
* [[Fashions Never Change]]: Discussed in chapter 1. The Medical Man points out that observing the Battle of Hastings in person would attract attention: "Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms."
* [[Foregone Conclusion]]: You know that the Time Traveler's going to come out okay (for now) because he's telling the narrator about it. Nobody asks [[Did You Die?]].
* [[Framing Device]]: The narrator is a guest at the Time
* [[Gentleman Adventurer]]:
* [[Giant Enemy Crab]]: There are lots of them in the farther future.
* [[I'm Taking Her Home with Me]]: In chapter 7, the Time
* [[I Want My Jetpack]]: Probably the [[Ur Example]] of the trope. Time Traveler arrives in the distant year 802701, expecting to see all those marvelous achievements of mankind, and what does he find? A [[Scavenger World]] inhabited by tiny childish people who think he fell from the sun.
▲* [[I'm Taking Her Home with Me]]: In chapter 7, the Time Traveller plans to take Weena back to his home time.
* [[Kill the Cutie]]: Damn, {{spoiler|poor Weena...}}
* [[The Night That Never Ends]]: After the Earth stops rotating around its axis in the distant future, part of it becomes plunged in perpetual twilight.
* [[No Name Given]]: The main character, both the films decided to change this. Also every Eloi other than Weena.
* [[Popcultural Osmosis]]:
* [[The Reveal]]: {{spoiler|The Eloi aren't the rulers of the world - they're the cattle.}}▼
* [[Scavenger World]]
* [[Society Marches On]]: Back when the book was written, English society could be mostly divided into two classes, the aristocracy and working class. H. G. Wells assumed this model would remain for over 800 thousand years, finally separating mankind into two different species. However, the twentieth century brought radical changes in society and today even the middle class has three subclasses.
* [[Spell My Name with a Blank]]:
* [[Spooky Silent Library]]: The book and all adaptations have included a scene involving an enormous abandoned library where all books have decayed to dust.
* [[They Called Me Mad]]:
▲* [[The Reveal]]: {{spoiler|The Eloi aren't the rulers of the world - they're the cattle.}}
* [[Through the Eyes of Madness]]: Played with briefly, when the Time
▲* [[They Called Me Mad]] (several of the main character's colleagues scoff at his theories about time travel, which, of course, turn out to be true)
* [[Time and Relative Dimensions In Space]] Unlike some other time machines, this one doesn't "teleport". It rests on the ground while it travels through time, and the continental drift carries it.
* [[Time Machine]]:
* [[Time Travel]]
▲* [[Through the Eyes of Madness]]: Played with briefly, when the Time Traveller nears the end of his story. His thoughts grow more rambling and he starts to wonder aloud if he's somehow imagined the whole experience, or if he's only imagining being home right now. He insists upon seeing the time machine again for himself and, once he does, he comes back to his senses.
* [[To the Future and Beyond]]
* [[Unreliable Narrator]]: Various hypotheses about the nature of the Eloi as the story progresses, with the narrator admitting that even
* [[Urban Segregation]] (the genesis of the Morlocks and the Eloi)
* [[Veganopia]]:
* [[Victorian London]]:
* [[Weird Sun]]:
* [[We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future]]: Discussed extensively; the
▲* [[Weird Sun]]: travelling millions of years into the future, Time Traveler notices the sun growing larger and more red, as well as slowing down on its way across the horizon, until finally setting still forever. He concludes that the Earth must have ceased to spin around its axis.
* [[Writer on Board]]
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* [[Apocalyptic Log]]: The "talking rings", which dictate news broadcasts when spun upon a dais. The two heard in the film relay information about a war, and the separation of the Eloi and the Morlocks to the Time Traveler.
* [[Cold War]] (the film is very much a product of its time)
* [[Composite Character]]: In the book, the Time
* [[Convection, Schmonvection]]: after London gets nuked in 1966, everything around catches on fire, except for the protagonist of course. Oh, and the grass he's standing on.
* [[Eternal English]] (In the book the Eloi had their own language which The Time Traveler didn't understand, here they speak English ''over 800,000 years'' later. Presumably the talking rings have something to do with this.)
* [[The Great Politics Mess-Up]]:
{{quote|
* [[Hey, It's That Voice!]]: Paul Frees has had multiple voice acting roles and is recognizable as the voice of the [[Apocalyptic Log|"talking rings"]]. You can also recognize Alan Young's legendary Scottish brogue in Filby (he's the voice of Scrooge [[McDuck]] in both Mickey's Christmas Carol, and [[DuckTales (1987)]].
* [[Literary Agent Hypothesis]]: Though the Time Traveler is referred to as "George", the machine's date indicator plate clearly reads "Manufactured by H. George Wells" meaning the Time
* [[Named by the Adaptation]]: The Time
* [[Next Sunday
** This could even border on [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]], with 1966 London full of skyscrapers and having shiny monorail, not to mention "tubeless TV" on window display.
* [[No New Fashions in the Future]]: The Eloi women love their '50s hair. Weena, whose attitude and interests are akin to a child, even calls attention to it by asking George how the women of his time wear their hair.
* [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]]: Time Traveler goes forward in time at the speed of thousands of years every second, yet he can still see the wall behind him being built, block by block.
* [[Stranded with Edison]]: Implied by the ending. When Wells leaves after telling his friend Filby about his adventures, he takes three books from his vast library. Filby asks the housekeeper (and the audience), "If you were going to start civilization over again, which three books would you choose?"
* [[Training the Peaceful Villagers]]
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== 2002 Movie ==
* [[Above the Ruins]]
* [[Adaptation Expansion]]: Our hero now has a [[Backstory]] in which he invents the time machine in order to go back and prevent his
* [[Artistic License Astronomy]]: An explosion on the Moon rains debris upon the Earth and leaves the Moon itself split into two large broken halves and a cloud of smaller rocks over a period of almost a million years, rather than either gravitationally attracting each other back into a single body or spreading themselves out into a ring system as they actually would have over that long an interval.
* [[Awesome Anachronistic Apparel]]: When the doctor stops in the (relatively) near future, a girl passing by admires his "retro" outfit.
* [[Bare Your Midriff]]: Mara's outfit.
* [[Brain Critical Mass]]: The far future villain has a massive brain that extends down his back. He uses it to control the beasts that prey on the humans.
* [[Spell My Name with a "The"]]: The Uber-Morlock's real name is apparently Jeremy Morlock. Heh.
* [[Chekhov's Gun]]: Hartdegen reaching out of the time bubble to catch his dropped pendant {{spoiler|and his hand rapidly aging while outside the bubble's protection}}.
* [[Disposable Woman]]: The time-traveler's
* [[Eternal English]]: This time, they have their own language, but they still speak "the Stone Language" found on pieces of ruins of U.S. buildings. And the AI librarian (see [[Who Wants to Live Forever?]] below) likely fills the same role in maintaining early 21st-century American English pronunciation as the talking rings did in the 1960 film.
* [[Evil Albino]]
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* [[I Choose to Stay]]
* [[Large Ham]]: See below -- [[One-Scene Wonder]]
* [[Lost in Imitation]]: This film seems to really be a rather loose [[The Remake|remake]] of the 1960 film, which itself was a somewhat loose
* [[My Brain Is Big]]: The Uber-
* [[Named by the Adaptation]]: Alexander Hartdegen, the
* [[The Lost Lenore]]: The protagonist is now entirely motivated by the loss of his love, Emma.
* [[One-Scene Wonder]]: As with [[Star Trek]] [[First Contact]], the Morlocks were given a leader that had not existed previously, in order to explain what was going on those unfamiliar with the source material. Played [[Ham and Cheese|with a side of cheese]] by [[Jeremy Irons]].
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* [[Ragnarok Proofing]]: Averted with the planet in general. After the moon disaster, any traces of civilization were pretty much obliterated over millions of years. Inexplicably played straight with the photonic library computer. His main processing unit survives orbital bombardment, the resulting millions of years of neglect, and somehow end up ''underground'' on top of that. He even still has numerous functioning projection screens.
* [[Recursive Canon]]: Alex is offered a copy of HG Wells's "The Time Machine" in the future library.
* [[Ridiculously-Human Robots]]: The photonic library computer. The computer even gets visibly irritated at what he regards as stupid questions from the Time
* [[Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory]]
* [[Science Is Bad]]: "We went too far."
** The irony is that Alexander has drawings in his lab that perfectly mirror the 2030's New York. Despite the fact that Alexander is a visionary, it was ultimately men like him that doomed the world.
* [[Slobs Versus Snobs]]: Morlocks and Eloi.
* [[Spinning Clock Hands]]: The first sign Professor Hartdegen is
* [[Temporal Paradox]]
* [["The Reason You Suck" Speech]]: Given to the hero by the ''villain'' of all people.
{{quote|
'''Uber-Morlock''': [[Armour Piercing Question|And what is time travel?]] But your pathetic attempt to control the entire world around '''you'''! }}
* [[Time Is Dangerous]]: The titular device creates a spherical bubble to protect the occupant. Reach outside, that protection no long applies. The main character hurts his hand when he instinctively grabs at an item he dropped. A Morlock wrestling with him on the machine ends up hanging outside the bubble, aging into dust. Logically, any attempt to reach outside the bubble should have violently scattered their atoms across dozens of years of history, but the [[Rapid Aging]] looked cooler, presumably.
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** He couldn't save his girlfriend because it would remove his reason for creating the time machine, but could stop that future from occurring because he was just observing it.
*** But remember that he wouldn't be able to observe it in the future if he prevented it from happening in the first place. The same effect, only the other way round.
**** Ah, but! Saving his
** Although [[Fridge Horror]] sets in when you
*** But then he fixed it all with a big time explosion. Time explosions are special; they can destroy all Morlock colonies simultaneously without affecting the geology enough to dislodge the precious Eloi towns precariously stuck to the sides of precipices. Time explosions are funny that way.
* [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]]: The Time Traveler stops off in the 2030s on his way to 802701.
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* [[Weenalized]] (again)
* [[Who Wants to Live Forever?]]: The photonic library computer AI from 2030, who inexplicably manages to survive what is basically the apocalypse in an above-ground building which presumably has absolutely no protection from that sort of thing, and whose power and memory unit last literally hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that he remembers ''everything'' doesn't help. Leads to a bit of [[Pet the Dog]] when he's given the opportunity to do the one thing he wants to do: teach.
* [[You Can't Fight Fate]]: Played straight and then possibly averted. The main character tries to save his girlfriend but every time, his girlfriend gets killed; the chief Morlock later explains that the time machine cannot change the past in a way that prevents it from being built in the first place. Later in the movie, he goes to a [[Bad Future]] where the Morlocks have wiped out the Eloi, and then he goes back in time and wipes out the Morlocks. Either this means he
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Science Fiction Films]]
[[Category:
[[Category:Hugo Award]]
[[Category:Science Fiction Literature]]
[[Category:The Time Machine]]▼
[[Category:H. G. Wells]]
[[Category:Multiple Works Need Separate Pages]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Time Machine, The}}
▲[[Category:The Time Machine]]
[[Category:Films of the 1960s]]
[[Category:Films of the 2000s]]
[[Category:Films Based on Novels]]
[[Category:Film Remakes]]
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Film]]
[[Category:British Literature]]
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