Episode 24: The Time Machine

In 1985, Doc Brown and Marty McFly traveled into the distant future of 2015, where we all had flying cars and hoverboards, wore our pockets inside out, and Pepsi cost $50. But Doc Brown and Marty were chumps, because real time travelers don’t mess with a few decades. Real time travelers say, “hey, I wonder what the year 802,701 is like” -- and hoooo boy is it f*cked. This week, we’re bringing you H. G. Wells’s 1895 novella, The Time Machine. We talk about the radical potentials of sci-fi and other speculative fiction, what it means to envision a human timeline on this massive a scale, how Wells envisions the evolution of class conflict, and what exactly is up with the Eloi. (It’s a little icky, if we do say so ourselves.) We also discuss the Anthropocene and how the novella kinda might have an account of that, even though Wells in the 1890s couldn’t possibly have known what that is. Beat that, Jules Verne! Oh, did we mention V. I. Lenin thought Wells was bae? He did, and we have proof. On the show, we read the Penguin Classics edition edited by Patrick Parrinder with an introduction by Marina Warner. We also mention Frederic Jameson’s fabulous Archaeologies of the Future -- a must-read for leftists interested in the relationship between utopian concepts and political critique and community. For more on Wells, Aaron Rosenberg’s “Romancing the Anthropocene: H. G. Wells and the Genre of the Future” is a compelling account of how form intersects with Wells’s conceptual and political concerns. *Note to our listeners. Megan is on maternity leave. She’ll be back on the show in a couple weeks. Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

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