The Time Machine
A dinner-party argument about the fourth dimension ends with a machine, a journey to the year 802,701, and a species divided into the delicate Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks. Wells invented very little of the apparatus; his originality is in using it as a piece of social criticism.
At under forty thousand words it is the most efficient entry point into early science fiction. The final chapters, in which the traveller goes further forward than anyone intended, are quieter and stranger than the famous ones.
Public-domain status
First published in 1895. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; H. G. Wells died in 1946, so this work has been free to republish there since 2017.
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