SOURCE: Huntington, John. Chapter on The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. In The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction, pp. 41-55. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Huntington perceives Wells's view of life in the future found in The Time Machine as a simplification of issues relevant at the time of the novella's publication.

Wells's use of balanced opposition and symbolic mediation as a way of thinking finds its most perfect form in The Time Machine. If the novella imagines a future, it does so not as a forecast but as a way of contemplating the structures of our present civilization.¹ At one level The Time Machine presents a direct warning about the disastrous potential of class division. But at a deeper level it investigates large questions of difference and domination, and rather than settling the issues, it constructs unresolvable conflicts...