The Time Machine

The Time Traveller, who is never given a name, takes his machine forward to the year 802,701. There he meets the childlike and lazy Eloi, who never work but rather spend their days playing and eating fruit. And the Morlocks, industrious and hideous people who live underground and sneak out at night to kidnap Eloi for their feasts. The Morlocks steal his time machine, so he is forced to spend some days with the Eloi before he can recover the time machine. He makes one Eloi friend, a girl (or woman, but as the Eloi are childlike it's much the same thing) named Weena. She becomes rather smitten with him after he saves her from drowning. Sadly, she later perishes in a forest fire that the Time Traveller starts when he is trying to escape from attacking Morlocks.

Recovering his Time Machine, the Time Traveller zooms to the future and watches the dying earth, now tidally locked with a swollen red sun. He sees strange creatures, and then the end of life. Then he zips back and recounts the whole adventure to his dinner guests.

It's all rather dull. But I did enjoy the first chapter, where the Time Traveller and his friends sat around talking about the theory of time travel. It struck me as such a perfectly normal sort of conversation for inquisitive young scientific minds to have, and indeed, I remember having similar conversations with geeky friends when I was in school.