The Time Machine

From goodreads: The story that launched Wells's successful career-the classic tale of the Time Traveler and the extraordinary world he discovers in the far distant future. A haunting portrayal of Darwin's evolutionary theory carried to a terrible conclusion.

I read the original dystopian (1984), so I figured I ought to read the original time travel novel. The Time Machine is just plain weird. I'm glad I read it, though. There's something historical and fascinating about this. If H.G. Wells hadn't wrote this novel would sci-fi be the same today? He was arguably the first person to take our current society and try to project it into the future. This was published shortly after Darwin's The Origin of Species became so popular in Europe, so evolution was definitely a big influence on the plot of The Time Machine. Wells' future society shows humankind evolving into two very distinct different species in the future. Naturally, our main character, The Time Traveler, spends most of the novel trying to escape from the more vicious and cannibalistic of the two. Anyway, very interesting and worth a short read. It doesn't take long to get through this.