The Time Machine, Chapter FIve

In which the Time Machine most mysteriously goes missing, presumed inside the sphinx; the Time Traveler makes a little friend; and discovers new structures an inhabitants that lead him to revise his politico-evolutionary hypothesis.



Enter the Morlocks! They naturally will play a most important part to come, and as the Time Traveler has already mentioned he has not quite gotten the whole picture yet.

Today's cover is from a 1927 edition by Heinemann. And... nope, I have no idea what's going on here. I mean, I may have forgotten some scene after we rejoin the framing narrative wherein someone at the dinner party starts having some sort of convulsions, but I don't think so. And even if there is, or were, that's the scene you put on the cover? Nothing science-fictiony at all? No future world, no strange creatures, no Time Machine, nothing even vaguely time-related, like a clock or the sun? You want it to look like a murder-mystery? Suit yourself, artist whose work was not scanned in hi-res enough for me to make out the signature, and whose cover I can't find anywhere other than here.

And now useful notes, after the jump! Mostly definitions, but also some talk of sewers. Yay!

At 11:29, TT states that he is too "Occidental" to sit still for long. "The Occident" meant Western Europe, and other Western countries (like, eventually, the Americas.) This was as opposed to the more-familiar-to-modern-ears term "the Orient," which was Eastern countries like China and Japan, countries which TT presumably associates with stillness and contemplation. Both terms have rather fallen out of favor as being distinctly Eurocentric.

Shortly after that, he uses the term "monomania," which is a pretty cool old term for obsession.

Around the 15:00 mark, he starts to think about the "sanitary apparatus," and how he has seen no sign of "drains and bells and modes of conveyance." He's wondering about their sewage system (something that was rather a novelty in late 1800's England), telegraphs, and trains, more or less. I WAS PROMISED FLYING CARS.

Then, at 24:09, TT sees "a leash" of the mysterious creatures bearing something off. A "leash" means "three," for some reason.

At 24:47, a "queer notion of Grant Allen's" comes into his head, to his amusement. Grant Allen was a science writer and novelist of the time, known as an innovator in detective and science fictions, as well as popularizing and mainstreaming the theory of evolution. TT is referring specifically to an idea about ghosts building up from past generations that Allen writes about in one of his stories. Oh, and he was another socialist, and a member of the Fabian Society.

Similarly, at 25:43 he refers to ideas of "the younger Darwin," meaning one of Charles's son, Sir George Darwin, who was an astronomer who speculated that the Earth's orbit would eventually decay, causing it to fall into the Sun. We now know, of course, that the Sun will swell up as a red giant and swallow us up long before that happens (but still probably not for another 5 billion years or so.)

Lastly, at 35:00 he mentions the "etiolated pallor" of the Morlocks. To "etiolate" mean to make pale, usually referring to a plant kept out of the sun. Then, at 35:33, he bemoans that he does not have a cicerone, like in the utopian fiction he's read, which just means some sort of a sightseeing guide.

And that's it! All the players are now on the field.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!