The Time Machine

The Time Machine is H. G. Wells's masterpiece of scientific romance—the book that invented the time travel genre and helped create modern science fiction.

An unnamed inventor, the Time Traveller, has built a machine that can move through the fourth dimension. He demonstrates it to a group of skeptical Victorian gentlemen, then vanishes. When he finally returns—battered, haunted, and exhausted—he tells them an extraordinary tale.

He has traveled to the year 802,701 AD. There, humanity has split into two species. Above ground live the Eloi—beautiful, childlike, and idle, spending their days in play. Below ground, in the darkness, lurk the Morlocks—ape-like creatures who emerge at night to prey on their fragile cousins.

The Time Traveller soon discovers that his time machine has been stolen—dragged into the Morlocks' underground world. To return home, he must descend into darkness, fighting for his survival against creatures that are no longer human. And when he ventures even further into the distant future, to the dying days of Earth itself, he witnesses something far more terrible: the cold, silent end of all life.

Published in 1895, The Time Machine is a brilliant work of social satire, disguised as an adventure story. Wells uses the future to critique the class divisions of his own Victorian England—imagining a world where the privileged have evolved into fragile, helpless creatures, and the working class into brutal predators.

This is the book that inspired countless time travel stories that followed, from Doctor Who to Back to the Future. Kingsley Amis wrote of Wells: "None of his successors has yet matched the power and range and authority of his imagination."

This audiobook is based on the 1895 public domain text. Produced and narrated by Doushu, with AI assistance.

© 2026 HongMei Zhou (Audiobook): 9780466653781

Release date

Audiobook: 23 April 2026