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H. G. Wells' Time Machine

Dragonrock

Militant Elvisian Tacoist
Dragonrock
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Rather than continuing to hijack another thread I thought I'd start one of my own.

In the thread Was Feynman right? it was asked what sentence would you send to a civilization rendered primitive by nuclear war. In H. G. Wells The Time Machine the hero took two books and went back...er, I mean returned to the future to rebuild civilization. The question of which books was left to the reader. So, I ask now, what two books would you bring? Also, what is the nature or relation of the two books you chose? Please be as specific (a copy of Frank Herbert's Dune and the screenplay from Ishtar) or as general (a chemistry book and a dictionary) as you would like.
 
I'd bring "Lord of the Flies" and "Calvin and Hobbes - Another Lazy Sunday Afternoon"...

Or I'd bring "George Carlins Braindroppings and Silly Putty" and a book filled with nothing but Pillory quotes...
 
I think I've made it perfectly clear I'm Hellbent on destroying civilization with tasteless humor and imbecility...
 
Dragonrock said:
Rather than continuing to hijack another thread I thought I'd start one of my own.

In the thread Was Feynman right? it was asked what sentence would you send to a civilization rendered primitive by nuclear war. In H. G. Wells The Time Machine the hero took two books and went back...er, I mean returned to the future to rebuild civilization. The question of which books was left to the reader. So, I ask now, what two books would you bring? Also, what is the nature or relation of the two books you chose? Please be as specific (a copy of Frank Herbert's Dune and the screenplay from Ishtar) or as general (a chemistry book and a dictionary) as you would like.
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I thought it was three.
 
Yeah, thread necromancy alert - eight and a half years.

And even though Dragonrock hasn't posted in a while, I'd just like to pedantically point out that the returning-with-some-books thing came from the George Pal movie. In the original story, the Time Traveler went out again with some exploring kit, fully intending to return with proof and a specimen. But he didn't say where when he was going to.

Fred
 
Only a few hours ago I was searching the Internet for ["Dan O" "time machine"] to se what I had been up to and H. G. Wells popped up in the first link. Is it a coincident or conspiracy that this thread should be resurrected at this time?!
 
If I limit the book to the ones on my bookshelf at the moment, I'd have to choose my copy of Feynman's "Lectures on Physics" as #1 and #2 will have to be E.O. Wilson's "The Diversity of Life".
 
Nowhereman is correct
The timetravler kind of implied that he may go to the past.
I just reread the story in ebook form after first reading it in H’school many yarns ago.
But if he wanted to help the Eloi I’d say a general medical book and one about basic horticulture would be the most helpful.
 
"Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that
gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first
glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags.
The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I
presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had
long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left
them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic
clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I
might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition.
But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the
enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting
paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly
of the _Philosophical Transactions_ and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics."

Philosophical Transactions and his own seventeen papers upon
physical optics were probably the two books that the character chose to take with him.
 
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h.g.Whiz said:
Philosophical Transactions and his own seventeen papers upon physical optics were probably the two books that the character chose to take with him.
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I doubt it- nobody in that time would read them or be inspired by them. He's just annoyed at the amount of work he put into them, and the fact that all that work has been forgotten and wasted.
 
Excel for Dummies and a copy of Penthouse.

That'd really **** with the minds of those left behind. Then I'd go back in time about 3 years and make a MUCH larger time machine and load it with everything I could think of to take over the world and remake it in my image.

Hell, I'd probably be the cause of the Eloi and the Morlocks diverging....
 
Nowhere Man said:
And even though Dragonrock hasn't posted in a while, I'd just like to pedantically point out that the returning-with-some-books thing came from the George Pal movie. In the original story, the Time Traveler went out again with some exploring kit, fully intending to return with proof and a specimen. But he didn't say where when he was going to.
Click to expand...

You appear to be right. Checking the original text [here], there's nothing about him taking books. All we get it...

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he
swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy
savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the
Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian
brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now--if I may use the
phrase--be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral
reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did
he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still
men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome
problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own
part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment,
fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating
time! I say, for my own part. He, I know--for the question had been
discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made--thought
but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the
growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must
inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that
is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me
the future is still black and blank--is a vast ignorance, lit at a
few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for
my comfort, two strange white flowers--shrivelled now, and brown and
flat and brittle--to witness that even when mind and strength had
gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart
of man.
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I was referring to the section before that, where the Time Traveler was talking with the Narrator before he left.
... The Time Traveller met me in the smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed when he saw me, and gave me an elbow to shake. 'I'm frightfully busy,' said he, 'with that thing in there.'

'But is it not some hoax?' I said. 'Do you really travel through time?'

'Really and truly I do.' And he looked frankly into my eyes. He hesitated. His eye wandered about the room. 'I only want half an hour,' he said. 'I know why you came, and it's awfully good of you. There's some magazines here. If you'll stop to lunch I'll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all. If you'll forgive my leaving you now?'

I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and he nodded and went on down the corridor...
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I've read the story many-many times over the years, so I know what's in it. The epilogue, especially the last sentence, is one of the most touching things I've ever read in SF.

(BTW, if the spell checker hadn't pointed it out, I would not have noticed that Wells spelled "Traveller" with 2 L's.)

Fred
 
Nowhere Man said:
I was referring to the section before that, where the Time Traveler was talking with the Narrator before he left.
I've read the story many-many times over the years, so I know what's in it. The epilogue, especially the last sentence, is one of the most touching things I've ever read in SF.

(BTW, if the spell checker hadn't pointed it out, I would not have noticed that Wells spelled "Traveller" with 2 L's.)

Fred
Click to expand...

He also spells the word "today" with a dash. (to-day)
 
Indeed. All this time and I never picked up on that. My spellchecker is USian.

Fred
 
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