The Time Machine is special in the long list of dystopias because it is one of the first. Dystopia is a unique genre in that it at once explores the future while reflecting the present. Instead, time travel is the frame through which he explores the particular anxieties of his time. That being said, time travel isn’t the point of Wells’ novella. In fact, I suspect that many would happily contend that The Time Machine is the original impetus for the concept that would spawn such popular media as Dr Who and the wider aspect of time travel seen in other science fiction.
Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895, a time well before time travel as we know it was even conceived of. His Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., 1934) reviews his world. His educational works, some written in collaboration, include The Outline of History (1920) and The Science of Life (1930). Wells drew on his own early struggles in many of his best novels, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, 'an important liberator of thought and action'. His controversial views on sexual equality and women's rights were expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). Later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress, whose anticipations of a future world state include The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
His prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898).
Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories and programmes for world regeneration. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. After two years' apprenticeship in a draper's shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. Wells, the third son of a small shopkeeper, was born in Bromley in 1866.
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