100 Great Books: (Book 18: HG Wells' The Time Machine)
What is progress?
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
Written at the height of Victorian confidence, The Time Machine asks what progress ultimately produces. H. G. Wells sends his Time Traveller into the far future to examine the long-term consequences of comfort, inequality, and technological success. The world he encounters is orderly, efficient, and strangely diminished, shaped by generations who inherited ease without understanding its foundations.
The Time Traveller is a man of his age: rational, curious, and convinced that knowledge itself is a virtue. His journey reveals how deeply that assumption can fail. The future he observes is not defined by catastrophe, but by slow drift. It speaks to societies that trust progress to take care of itself, and to people who believe the future will be kinder simply because it arrives later.
