SOURCE: Derry, Stephen. “The Time Traveller's Utopian Books and His Reading of the Future.” Foundation, no. 65 (autumn 1995): 16-24.

In the following essay, Derry investigates possible contemporary literary influences on Wells's novella The Time Machine, including works by Edward Bellamy, William Morris, and E. G. E. Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race.

The Time Traveller is the author of seventeen papers on physical optics, and presumably of various patents as well, but he is probably unused to telling tales. However, he tells his audience that he has read “visions of Utopias and coming times”,¹ and compares his own experiences with the conventions of such fictions. For instance, he has to try to make sense of the world of AD 802,701, without any help from the inhabitants—he notes that “I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books.”² But whilst his experiences seem to contrast with those of visitors...