Oh, the future. Having gone through college to study something that you find out that you hate makes one prone to not wanting to think about the future. Yet we speculate anyway. In my mind, I've lived out many lifetimes: sometimes as a world famous author, sometimes as a philanthropist, trying in vain to make the wold suck less, and sometimes just living a quiet, simple life, close to family and friends. But the point is, we always plan for the future to be better than the present. With every human advancement come opportunities to innovate, to improve. But what is the limit to human ability? H. G. Wells asks this very question in the classic The Time Machine.
I would say that H. G. Wells' The Time Machine is part Beowulf and part Idiocracy. Sounds like an odd combination, to anyone who knows both the epic poem and the movie of which I speak, but it really is quite fitting. The protagonist of this story, known only as "The Time Traveler," ventures to an unknown future, hundreds of thousands of years from his late 1800s setting. What he finds there is an eerie, complacent people, much like those in Idiocracy, who have advanced so much that the lack of need for innovation has left them simple-minded. This people, the Eloi basically go about their lives seeking pleasure and merriment, with nothing to fear...except for the dark. To defend themselves against this great evil and whatever in it may lurk, they all sleep en masse, much like the men in Heorot, terrorized by the possibility of ambush.
To me, the most interesting aspect of this story is it's modern day relevance. It is essentially a story of a factional populace that has grown to hate and fear each other. It becomes extremely difficult to objectively judge who is the villain and who is the oppressed. I love this, because, even though our society loves to villanize each other, none of us are as right as we think we are. The Time Traveler starts to see that the issues behind the division may be more gray than black and white, but as the only outside observer, he does not have the luxury of remaining objective, when those around him are not willing or able to see that as an option.
This book is science fiction at its best; it doesn't wave around its technology only to say "look at all the cool things we can hypothetically invent!" Instead, it uses the setting as a tool to tell the story. Through these absurd characters and locations, we are able to see traces of our own humanity. In this way, the story is able to be more didactic. It shudders and says: "This is what humanity has the potential to become."
No comments:
Post a Comment