H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine seems to fall more into the category of a study in social science than in science fiction, the more I think about the book. Instead of examining the effects of a new technology or alien lifeforms on humanity, Wells examines the eventual evolution of societies taken to the extreme. As Chris pointed out, the Time Traveller presents two opposing theories as to how humankind managed to evolve into the creatures he observes in the future, one a communist view that the loss of conflict and violence allowed people to become harmonious, weak and simple-minded, and the other a capitalist view that the separation between the privileged class and the working class had become so great as to split species, turning one set of people into the feeble-minded Eloi who play all day, and the other set into the Morlocks, who provide for the Eloi out of a single-minded need to protect their food source.
What I found most interesting about these theories is the change in the power dynamics in the second theory. Both the Eloi and Morlocks have become simple creatures that live only to serve their own needs and desires, but they have evolved to do so in different ways. The Eloi’s needs are provided for by the Morlocks, and thus they are free all day to weave flower garlands and try to swim. The Morlocks seem to have an ingrained need to provide for the needs of the Eloi, but this need is no longer the working-class job it evolved from. Instead it is the protection of a food source. Instead of growing and caring for crops, the Morlocks are breeding Eloi. Thus with the degradation of the human mind in both forms of being, the Morlocks, who still know enough, or at least have an ingrained behavior pattern, to be able to care for the Eloi, have an edge over the Eloi, who have no need for knowledge about anything. The Morlocks have overcome the Eloi through evolution instead of revolution.
2 comments:
I don't take the Morlocks' relationship toward the Eloi as anything but how Wells describes it: that their biology has made it a reflex to make clothes for the Eloi the same way that they instinctively cleaned and lubricated the Time Machine. As far as the reader is concerned, the Morlocks are not any smarter than the Eloi; they just have a different specialization. I would certainly not call this a victory of evolution.
I never meant that the Morlocks had won some sort of victory over the Eloi, merely that through their differing evolution, power transferred from the Eloi to the Morlocks. Also, Wells does say that "The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper." So the Morlocks have retained more ability to think than the Eloi, according to the Time Traveller's theory. Regarding his time machine, the Time Traveller also posits "that the Morlocks had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose." Their treatment of the device was not merely an instinctive need to clean it, but also a small attempt to understand it. These small demonstrations of cognitive ability show that, at least in the Time Traveller's opinion, the Morlocks do have an intellectual superiority over the Eloi.
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