Re: Time Machine revised?

Girish <girishbhat6620@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

But I have a fairly strong recollection that the Time Traveller had
had 3 different adventures
1) With the morlocks
2) The end of life
3) And an adventure somewhere in the 21st or 22nd century.

The 3rd episode is not present in this version that I read,
anthologized in the SFWA Hall of Fame Book II A.(The novella
collection). The copyright also says 1934 whereas wikipedia tells me
that the story was first published in serial form in the New Review
through 1894 and 1895.

There's a good book called THE DEFINITIVE TIME MACHINE, edited by
Harry M. Geduld. It has the text of the 1924 revision of the story
(which is the one usually reprinted), the original magazine-serialized
version in the New Review, a very different version published earlier
in the National Observer, and synopses of even older unpublished
manuscripts on the same topic. There are also maps, detailed footnotes,
and several interesting articles relating T.T.M. to other subjects from
movie technology to Beowulf. I can highly recommend it.

In the original manuscript of THE TIME MACHINE, there was an extra
chapter called "The Return of the Time Traveller," which came after
his visit to the end of life on Earth. On his way back, he finds
that the Morlocks have disconnected the dials indicating the date --
so he is lost in time! He can only tell how far he's travelled. He
overshoots his target and ends up far in the past, when London is
a swampy wetland. There's a lot of description of life in what sounds
like the Pliocine epoch. But he needs an exact date by which to
calibrate his machine, so he goes forward again and finds himself
in the middle of the English Civil War, attacked by Puritans. They
nearly kill him for practicing witchcraft (from morlocks to warlocks!)
but he is able to learn the date and escape again. (I wonder if that's
the reason he doesn't arrive back at his starting date accurately --
he forgot about the big calendar adjustment in the 18th century.)

I dare say this removal of material makes H G Wells vision even more
powerful.

I think you are right. It seemed like Wells was so thrilled to have
a fictional time machine to play with that he couldn't resist sending
the Time Traveller all over the chronological map. It's fun, but
detracts from the cumulative effect of the story.

- David Librik
librik@xxxxxxxxx
.

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