I was gripped with a sudden urge, while wandering drunkenly through the library (truth?), to reread HG Well's awesome book--it's a little less awesome now than it was four or five years ago (what, is that even real), but it's still good. Better than the Autocracy of Mr Parham. Always better than that. Anything would be better than that.
Anyways, this is the first time machine story ever written. (Well, the first well-known one in any case. Shush.) That has never hit me before reading it this one time--I was reading the section where the Victorian men were trying to puzzle out how the time machine could move back in time if they had never seen it in their friend's room before. Finally it occurs to one of them that it moves at super speed or whatever as it goes back, and whatever else. It has never occurred to me before that someone could take the idea of time travel for granted, but I clearly had. All the late Victorian and turn-of-the-century people probably basically peed themselves when they read this. Also, I think that it's hilarious that the psychologist is the one who eventually figures out the super speed thing.
Oh, but the story itself--the pioneering scientist travels into the feature which has resulted from people attaining utopia, and then devolving in light of the easy life. The working class went underground and became gross ape-like monsters who feed on the upper class people, who have devolved into child-like creatures that aren't very bright. My next note has to do with this--you see, I've read a lot of studies that accredit human brain development to the fact that we started eating more and more meat because we figured out how to cook it and not die. All of these people ate fruit exclusively. Maybe HG Wells didn't do this intentionally, or did this just to contrast their purity with the Morlocks' cannibalistic evils, but still, that would definitely have an affect on their brain power and bodies. So... so yeah. It's also a bad idea to raise a kid (until age five or six, but even then it's questionable) on a strictly vegetarian diet because of the damage that can do. (HG Wells also mentions that they're all incredibly weak and light, so that's probably a super protein deficiency.)
Also, when he explains their diet he talks about how all cows and sheep and everything seemed to go extinct. Okay, HG Wells. Sure. That makes oodles of sense. Why bring it up other than to complain? Well, what he actually says is is that they "followed the Icthyosaurus into extinction" (Wells 32). Hehe. Awesome.
Eventually the time travelling narrator befriends one of the future non-Morlock humanoids. He saves her from drowning--while swimming or playing in a stream she gets a cramp and the moderate current picks her up and takes her away. Her fellows basically ignore her and leave her for dead, so the narrator dives in after her and rescues her. She falls in love with him immediately (which, of course, he doesn't understand--he believes for almost the entirety of their friendship that it was just a childish affection) and follows him everywhere. At first she annoys him, because "'I had not, I told myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation'" (Wells 54). It's funny because flirtations are considered minor or miniature (as compared to, say, romance or dating or getting married, because it was the Victorian era and getting married was your only option then), and because Weena (the girl) is no more than four feet fall... Ahhh, oh you, HG Wells!
Oh yeah, I always forget that the non-Morlocks are the Eloi, probably because HG Wells only mentions it once. It means "chosen" in Latin (although one of the baby naming sites it was one says it has Latin and French origins which doesn't really make sense since they developed at different speeds and times...?), which would make sense if these people were supposed to be the privileged upper class. The French saint of metalworking (no lie) is Saint Eloi. There doesn't seem to be a clear meaning behind the name Morlock, but apparently HG Wells wrote a quasi-prequel to this book (by quasi-prequel I mean one of his books is set a few centuries into the future and makes intimations that certain groups will develop into the Morlocks eventually. I wonder if HG Wells really believed that the way HP Lovecraft believed Asian people really would take over the world), which might have some clues in it...?
HG Wells also eventually figures out the true nature and relationship of the Eloi and Morlocks. He realizes that the Eloi are the main food source of the Morlocks and that explains all of their weird nighttime behaviour. I think he gives the Morlocks too much credit, though. He says the Eloi are akin to fatted cattle, which the Morlocks "'preserved and preyed upon--probably saw to the breeding of''" (Wells 80). The Morlocks are clearly more advanced physically than the Eloi, and more advanced mentally because being a predator obviously requires a more complex system of thought, but I don't think they're smart enough to control breeding and preservation and all of that. I think they're very much like cavemen--knowing where the prey is, and how much there ought to be, but beyond that, not really having a good idea of what's going on. (But just wait until Equality discovers electricity!) Though saying the Eloi are akin to fatted cattle is appropriate in what a fatted cattle is, that also automatically brings up the image of farming, which is definitely inappropriate for this situation.
...Also, now that I think of it, what happened to all the people every part of the world that's not London?
My next bit comes when... when that guy who I almost called the Doctor but most definitely is NOT the Doctor realizes he can scare the Morlocks with fire--he gets so excited he tells Weena (the Eloi female) to dance and he dances with her: "'It part it was a modest can-can, in part a step dance, in part a skirt dance (so far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original. For I am naturally inventive, as you know'" (Wells 87). At first I was like woaaah, ego! But then I remembered that he made a whole damn time machine, so maybe he should be allowed to brag a bit.
Anyways. He finds his time machine again, and Weena is killed due to his foolishness with the Morlocks--something I apparently misunderstood when I read it all 5,000 times in middle school. You see, I always thought she was simply stolen away, and that's why the time traveler goes back--to try and save her. The book ends--well, this edition has an epilogue, which for whatever reason my edition was bereft of--with the time traveler becoming determined to prove that the traveling occurred to our narrator who parrots back everything the traveler said in verbatim. The time traveler goes back in time, and the narrator tells us that he vanished three years ago and never returned. I kind of like it better when he's going back to save Weena and gets killed instead, instead of just trying to prove himself, but whatever. I'm not the one writing classic sci-fi novels at the turn of the century... Yet.
The epilogue is also a little too optimistic--basically the narrator is saying that the traveler could still be alive wandering the future or past, and that the future saw can be changed, and at least love and tenderness still lived on in the Eloi. It was probably to calm down all the Victorian people, who were probably smoking their smelling salts at that point in an effort to not vomit on everything, but... But ugh! It's so lame! It ruins the creepy implications of it! Stupid Victorians and their fear of absolutely everything. Anyways. Other than the lame-butt epilogue, this is Twilight Zone-worthy. No, I don't care that it predates the Twilight Zone by like seventy (woah, really!??) years.
MLA Citation information: Wells, HG. The Time Machine. Robert Bentley, Inc: United States of America, 1895. (Sorry, this one of those books that are definitely from the mid forties to mid fifties that don't feel like putting legitimate information in their books, which I guess doesn't really matter since this is all public domain and everything.)
I also started reading the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman. I read a spin-off series (Death: At Death's Door by Jill somebody, which I'm thinking is her specific take on all the events that occurred during the Sandman comics--though I'm not sure because it's only one volume... And I'm only one volume into Sandman.) and a spin-off of that spin-off (The Dead Boy Detectives) which sucks HARDCORE. I read Preludes & Nocturnes... I'm not sure if it was a prequel series made after the original series or what, but I jumped into it okay. There wasn't a huge learning curve, even if Martian Manhunter and the Scarecrow make appearances (yep). The only other related book was Dream Country, which is a collection of random quasi-related stories... That was good, though. Plus you get to see Morpheus wearing a ruff, sooo...
But yeah. I like the series so far, but unfortunately my access to it is limited until the summer (or maybe spring break, if I'm really lucky--shut up I don't have a life at all). The local library has only these two volumes (I believe), the school library only has The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (I tried reading it again but it's just so baaaaad), and my library at home only has the aforementioned spin-offs. Soo I'll keep you updated. But it's cool. Very cool.
I read JD Salinger's Nine Stories, too. I can't do a whole post for that--I don't really like focusing on short story collections. His stories are always all right, and always seem to be constructed okay, if not really well--but the ends are just... just failed. Talk about going out with a bang instead of a whimper. I can never quite follow them, for example, "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" starts out with the girl talking to her mother on the phone about her boyfriend, then it goes to the boyfriend who's being kind of creepy on the beach in a robe talking to young girls (yeah, I thought pedophile--even before it mentioned the girls, it was the robe that made me suspicious), who then shoots himself. It ends with him going into the room where she is sleeping and him loading up a gun a then shooting himself. I... What? What, because the little girl ran away before they were done talking or whatever? What? The next story does a lot of Holden Caulfield "I mean it--I mean I mean it" stuff that makes me want to pull my hair out.
The Esme story is in here too, and it's probably my favourite. Well, half of it is. Half of it is a little slice of life sort of deal, he meets a girl named Esme while in England during the war. Esme asks him to write her a story, and the second half of that story is presumably it? I'm not sure. But he's very good at presenting slice of lifes, just bad at making them do things. On the plus side, he writes about Connecticut all the time, and that's always exciting for me.
Anyways, these stories are more himself than anything else. All stories and art and music is the creator in some way, but these are a psychological study more than anything else. They are way more telling about Salinger's mental mechanisms than they are about anything else, I feel like. And I'm not just saying it because of all the analyzing in his daughter's book. I don't even really remember what she said, other than that she mentioned "Bananafish" a lot. But if you're interested in Salinger's mind, I'd suggest it. If you're kind of lukewarm on him, like me, you might not really be interested in this as much. Salinger's style in these stories isn't nearly as grating as Catcher in the Rye, but I still got bored quickly.
Wow, long post. I'm rereading Crabwalk, but I'm not going to write anything for it because I hate it even more this time around. Oops...
(Also, spellchecker has decided to peace out for this post, so sorry if I missed anything.)
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