The Time Machine

In his introduction to this classic, thought-provoking, 19th century novel, Michael Clay Thompson writes:

"H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is a supreme work of the imagination, a work so captivating in its vivid description of the distant future that the reader scarcely notices the radical art of the work, such as the almost total absence of dialogue and the fact that the main character is never named. The astounding final chapters are visionary to a degree almost unique in literature; one strains to think of comparisons other than Dante’s Inferno or Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The novel has it all: brilliant vocabulary, reflection on the implications of science, subtle and wry commentary on governmental and social systems, reflections on morality, a deep portrait of a creative genius whose mind isolates him even from his friends, luminous poetic writing, dazzling images...everything. It is a one-book humanities course."