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Post by SailorPtah on Feb 23, 2006 0:35:51 GMT -5
Confession to make.
While I have read the Great Illustrated Classics version of The Time Machine (these are editions of classic novels with highly simplified language and lots of pictures, very accessible), and I have seen one movie version (an old one that stayed pretty close to the plot), I have yet to read the actual novel.
(My Morlocks are designed after the drawings in the Great Illustrated Classic book ^_~)
Futher confession.
I started reading the actual book tonight, with an edition that I "borrowed" from my English classroom. I type "borrowed" in quotes because technically you're supposed to sign these books out, and I just sort of . . . slipped off with it.
It isn't bad so far - the GIC version changed some things, which irritates me, but the original isn't particularly hard to read. Besides, the GIC version actually added a whole chapter. (Frankly, I don't know where they get the nerve. Other GIC books I've read haven't done that.)
So I recommend the original ^_^ It may look intimidatingly thick, but I have the Dover Thrift Edition, which are paperback books that are conveniently cheap so schools can buy them in bulk, and it's extremely skinny when printed economically.
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Post by catmaries on Feb 26, 2006 23:05:22 GMT -5
I love the GIC, and they're such timesavers. Unfortunately, they never help out in school. I've get to find the GIC of "Death of a Salesman". Le sigh...
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Post by SailorPtah on Feb 27, 2006 0:31:45 GMT -5
I finally finished the actual book ^_^
Here's the socialist passage (page 41; chapter 5):
"At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem gortesque enough to you--and wildly incredible !--and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilise underground space for the less ornamental purpose of civilisation ; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the end--! Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth ?
"Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people--due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor--is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening gulf--which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich--will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by inter-marriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots ; the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there they would, no doubt, have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns ; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die ; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.
"The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfect science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of today . . . My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one."
[The Time Traveller speaking. He didn't know at this point in the story that the Morlocks eat the Eloi, but when he tells the story he knows it, and carries on about how most of his theories were incredibly wrong - but not this one. Even at the end of the tale, he believes this. In other words, Wells was saying "Boo, capitalism!" ]
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Post by aebliss on Feb 27, 2006 3:08:49 GMT -5
Hmm. Fascinating story, depressing view of the future. ^^; What ever happened to dreams of Utopia ...?
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Post by xuanwu on Feb 27, 2006 18:10:47 GMT -5
Wells wrote the novel during a time when a lot of future utopian novels were being made. He deliberately chose to pick a time and literary mechanisms that hadn't been done before. For example, the main character mentions how, "Normally, when a time traveler awakens, they have a guide of some sort who explains the function of the future world to them. I had no such guide."
Wells was going for a different sort of time travel book that avoided the cliches of his time. And he succeeded. (Another way to think of it is how Mark Twain made fun of other books about teenage protagnonists and daring heroes in "Huckleberry Finn.")
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