I’m almost finished with “The Time Machine” now and I found a strange similarity with this and “The Lurking Fear” by H. P. Lovecraft. Both of these writers love to do science fiction work, and both include two different species of men: the white, hiding-in-the-darkness gorilla people that inbreed and eat the other species: the people who have not been shunned by society and sent underground (or in Lovecraft’s case, locked in their own home) also known as the civilized, more evolved people.
Another similarity is that the people who are not hiding, do not cannibalize, and live close to normally speak a different language and look a bit strange. In “The Time Machine”, they are 800,000 years into the future, while in “The Lurking Fear”, the people are in the present on their own space of land.
What I found interesting in “The Time Machine” too was that the time traveler insists that going at speeds so high as to go into the future may actually bring yourself into another dimension. If so, he wouldn’t have ended up on Earth, as he remarks near the end of the story. The ‘current’ people in these stories do differentiate greatly between cultures though. In Lovecraft’s story, although they look more monkey-like than humans, in Wells’ story they definitely don’t.
In Wells’ story, what was interesting was he included the fact that their chins were smaller, they were very short and pale, and had big, bright eyes, looking like children, when in fact they were adults. They also all wore the same kind of soft material, and they all ate at the same place. There was no electricity, no currency to speak of, but biotechnology had gone so far as to create new and glorious breeds of flowers, which they all had in their gardens.
On another note, I’ve decided to look at the book “Night Watch” from the year 2000 and see what it was about; I’ve never seen it ever, actually. I was looking at it this morning and it was very useful for seeing the constellations during which seasons, and telling you how to spot certain stars such as Polaris.
Considering it’s from 2000, I don’t know how accurate it would be today. I’m assuming it would be close enough that you would be able to find mostly everything without too much of a hassle.
Next post coming tomorrow, about quasars, pulsars, blinking molecules, and novae (as opposed to supernovae)!
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