Questioning Our Assumptions in The Time Machine

We spent much of class discussing the problems we had with The Time Machine, most of which were issues with the scientific believability of the world as Wells described it. I believe that our discussion on those issues was useful because it let us discuss why the issues we had problems with made sense or were at least possible explanations in the time in which the book was written. This led to discussion of what the book said about society in relation to the context of the society at the time Wells wrote it, which allows us a deeper understanding of what he was trying to say about society and the pitfalls it needs to avoid.

On the other hand, the fact that we had to discuss the believability of the novel at all leads me to question how we were reading it. Though it was meant to take place in our world, the world of today is so different from both the world in which Wells lived and the one he created that we cannot judge the book based on criteria from today’s world. The book consistently follows it’s own logic, so we should not have to question the world it shows us. However, we do question that world, and not just because we are reading the book from a modern perspective. We also question that world because the Time Traveller himself questions that world. He doesn’t question it by pointing out what doesn’t make sense, but he questions it by creating hypotheses about it that are continually wrong. Because Wells forces us to see this new world through the Time Traveller’s eyes, his assumptions become our own, and as those assumptions are disproved, we begin to mistrust our own judgments of what is taking place in the future that Wells shows us.