Wells Social Imagination

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future, the world of 802, 701 AD.
The machine itself is the vaguest of mechanical assumptions, a thing of ivory, quartz, nickel and brass that quite illogically carries its rider into an existing past or future. We accept the machine as a literary device to give an air of probability to the essential thing, the experience; and forget the means in the effect. The criterion of the prophecy in this case is influenced by the theory of "natural selection." Mr. Wells' vision of the "Sunset of Mankind" was of men so nearly adapted to their environment that the need to struggle, with the corollary of the extermination of the unfit, had practically ceased. Humanity had become differentiated into two races, both recessive. The Eloi, the descendants of the leisured classes, have become child-like androgynous creatures, weak and unable to fend for them selves. Their lives of leisure are enjoyed only at the cost of premature death, at the hands of the cannibalistic Morlocks. The Morlocks, the ...

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