August 23, 2025 • 11 mins
The Time Machine is an 1895 dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells about a Victorian scientist known as the Time Traveller who travels to the year 802,701. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/just-reads--6173738/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Time Machine by HD Worlds, Chapter fourteen, The Further Vision.
I have already told you of the sickness and confusion
that comes with time traveling. And this time I was
not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in
an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time. I clung to
some machines. It swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went,
(00:22):
And when I brought myself to look the dials again,
I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One
dial records days, another records thousands of days, millions of
days on another, and another thousands of millions. Now, instead
of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so
as to go forward with them. And when I came
to look at these indicators, I found that the thousands
(00:44):
hand was sweeping round as fast as the second's hand
of a watch into futurity. As I drove on, a
peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The palpitating
grayness grew darker. Then, although I was still traveling with
prodigious velocity, the blinking succession of day and night, which
was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned and grew
(01:08):
more and more marked. This puzzled me very much. At first.
The alternations of day and night grew slower and slower,
and so did the passage of the sun across the sky,
until they seemed to stretch through centuries at least as steady.
At last, as steady twilight brooded over the earth, A
twilight broken only now and then, when a comet glared
(01:29):
across the darkling sky. The band of light that now
indicated the sun had long since disappeared, For the Sun
had ceased to set. It simply rose and fell in
the west, and grew ever broader and more red. All
trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars,
growing slower and slower, had given pace to creeping points
(01:51):
of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the
sun red and very large, halted motionless upon the Horzezon,
a vast dome, glowing with dull heat, now and then
suffering a momentary extinction. At one time it had, for
a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily
(02:12):
reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived, by the
slowing down of its rising and setting that the work
of the tidal drag was done. The Earth had come
to rest with one face to the Sun, just as
our own moon faces the Earth. Very cautiously, I remembered
my former headlong fall, and I began to reverse my motion.
(02:34):
Slower and slower went the circling hands, until the thousands
one seemed motionless, and the daily one was no longer
a mist upon its scale, Still slower, until the dim
outlines of a desolate beach grew visible. I stopped very
gently and sat upon the time machine, looking round. The
sky was no longer blue. Northeastwards it was an inky black,
(02:58):
and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the
pale white stars. Overhead was a deep Indian red sky
and starless. And southeastwards it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet,
where cut by the horizon lay the huge hull of
the Sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were
(03:19):
of a harsh reddish color, and all trace of life
that I could see at first was the intensely green
vegetation that covered every projecting point. To their southeastern face
was the same rich green that one sees on forest
moss or the lichen in caves plants, which like these
grow in perpetual twilight. The machine was standing on a
(03:41):
sloping beach. The seas stretched away to the southwest to
rise into a sharp, bright horizon against the sky. There
were no breakers and no waves. Not a breath of
wind was stirring. Only a slight, oily swell rose and
fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the Colnal
Sea was still moving and living. And all along the
(04:03):
margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation
of salt pink under the lurid sky. There was a
sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed I
was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my
only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the
air to be more rarefied than it is now. Far
(04:24):
away up the desolate slope, I heard a harsh scream
and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go
slanting and fluttering up into the sky and circling disappear
over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice
was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more
firmly upon the machine. Looking around me again, I saw
(04:45):
that quite near what I had taken to be a
reddish mass of rock, was moving slowly towards me, And
then I saw that the thing was really a monstrous
crablike creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as
yond the table, with its many legs eggs, moving slowly
and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae like
Carter's whips waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming
(05:09):
at you on either side of its metallic front. Its
back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a
greenish incrustation blotched it. Here and there. I could see
the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling
as it moved. As I stared at this sinister apparition
calling towards me, I felt a tickling on my cheek,
(05:30):
as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to
brush it away with my hand, but in a moment
it returned, and almost immediately came another behind my ear.
I struck at this and caught something threadlike. It was
drawn swiftly out of my hand and with a frightful choirm.
I turned and saw that I had grasped the antennae
of yet another monster crab that stood just behind me.
(05:52):
Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, Its mouth
was alive with appetite, and its vast, ungainly claws smeared
with an algal slime. There were descending upon me. In
a moment. My hand was on the lever, and I
placed a month between myself and these monsters. But I
was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly. Now,
(06:13):
as soon as I stopped, dozens of them seemed to
be crawling here and there in the somber light, among
the foliated sheets of intense green. I can't convey the
sense of abominable jesolation that hung over the world. The
red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt dead sea,
(06:34):
the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow stirring monsters,
the uniform poisonous green of the likeness plants, the thin
air that hurts one's lungs all contributed to an appalling effect.
I moved on one hundred years, and there was the
same red sun, a little larger, a little duller in
the same dying sea, the same chill in the air,
(06:55):
the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out
among the green weed and the red rocks. And in
the westward sky I saw a curved pale line like
a vast new moon. So I traveled, stopping ever and
again in great strides of a thousand years or more,
(07:15):
drawn on by the mystery of the Earth's fate, watching
with a strange fascination, as the Sun grow larger and
duller than the westward sky, and the life of the
old Earth ebb away. At last more than thirty million years.
Hence the huge red hot dome of the Sun had
come to obscure nearly a tenth of the darking heavens.
(07:38):
And I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of
crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its
livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. Now it was
flecked with white. A bit of cold assailed me. The
rare white flakes, ever again came eddying down to the northeastwards.
A glare of snow lay under the starlight of the
(07:59):
seables sky, and I could see an undulating crest of
hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice among the
sea margin were drifting masses farther out, but the main
expanse of that salt ocean or bloody under the eternal sunset,
was still unfrozen. I looked about me to see if
any traces of animal life remained. A certain indefinable apprehension
(08:23):
still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But
I saw nothing in earth, or sky or sea. The
green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was
not extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea,
and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied
I saw some black object flopping about on this bank,
(08:45):
but it became motionless as I looked at it, and
I judged that my eye had been deceived, and this
little black object was merely a rock. Stars in the
sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle
very little. Soddenly, I noticed the circular westward outline of
the sun had changed, that a concavity a bay had
(09:06):
opened in the curve. I saw this grow larger for
a minute. Perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that
was creeping over the day, And then I realized that
an eclipse was beginning. Either the Moon or the planet
Mercury was passing in front of the Sun's disk naturally.
At first I took it to be the Moon, but
(09:26):
there is much more to incline me to believe that
what I really saw was the transit of an inner
planet passing very near to the Earth. The darkness grew apace,
and a cold wind began to blow in refreshing gusts
from the east, and the showering white flakes in the
air increased in number. From the edge of the sea
came a ripple and a whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds,
(09:50):
the world was silent, silent. It would be hard to
convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man,
all the bleating of sheep, all the cries of birds,
the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background
of our lives, All that was over. As a darkness thickened,
the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes,
(10:10):
and the cold of the air more intense. At last,
one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white
peaks of the distant hills vanished into the blackness. The
breeze rose to a moaning wind, and I saw the
black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In
another moment, the pale stars were alone and visible. All
(10:32):
else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black. The
horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold
that smote to my marrow, and the pain that I
felt in breathing overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly
nausea seized me. Then like a red hot bow in
the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got
(10:54):
off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and
incapable of facing the journey. As I stood, sick and confused,
I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal. There
was no mistake now that it was a moving thing
against the red water of the sea. It was a
round thing, about the size of a football perhaps, or
(11:16):
maybe bigger tentacles trailed down from it. It seemed black
against the weltering blood red water, and it was hopping
fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting, but a
terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful
twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle
The Time Machine by HD Worlds, Chapter fourteen, The Further Vision.
I have already told you of the sickness and confusion
that comes with time traveling. And this time I was
not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in
an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time. I clung to
some machines. It swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went,
(00:22):
And when I brought myself to look the dials again,
I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One
dial records days, another records thousands of days, millions of
days on another, and another thousands of millions. Now, instead
of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so
as to go forward with them. And when I came
to look at these indicators, I found that the thousands
(00:44):
hand was sweeping round as fast as the second's hand
of a watch into futurity. As I drove on, a
peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The palpitating
grayness grew darker. Then, although I was still traveling with
prodigious velocity, the blinking succession of day and night, which
was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned and grew
(01:08):
more and more marked. This puzzled me very much. At first.
The alternations of day and night grew slower and slower,
and so did the passage of the sun across the sky,
until they seemed to stretch through centuries at least as steady.
At last, as steady twilight brooded over the earth, A
twilight broken only now and then, when a comet glared
(01:29):
across the darkling sky. The band of light that now
indicated the sun had long since disappeared, For the Sun
had ceased to set. It simply rose and fell in
the west, and grew ever broader and more red. All
trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars,
growing slower and slower, had given pace to creeping points
(01:51):
of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the
sun red and very large, halted motionless upon the Horzezon,
a vast dome, glowing with dull heat, now and then
suffering a momentary extinction. At one time it had, for
a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily
(02:12):
reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived, by the
slowing down of its rising and setting that the work
of the tidal drag was done. The Earth had come
to rest with one face to the Sun, just as
our own moon faces the Earth. Very cautiously, I remembered
my former headlong fall, and I began to reverse my motion.
(02:34):
Slower and slower went the circling hands, until the thousands
one seemed motionless, and the daily one was no longer
a mist upon its scale, Still slower, until the dim
outlines of a desolate beach grew visible. I stopped very
gently and sat upon the time machine, looking round. The
sky was no longer blue. Northeastwards it was an inky black,
(02:58):
and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the
pale white stars. Overhead was a deep Indian red sky
and starless. And southeastwards it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet,
where cut by the horizon lay the huge hull of
the Sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were
(03:19):
of a harsh reddish color, and all trace of life
that I could see at first was the intensely green
vegetation that covered every projecting point. To their southeastern face
was the same rich green that one sees on forest
moss or the lichen in caves plants, which like these
grow in perpetual twilight. The machine was standing on a
(03:41):
sloping beach. The seas stretched away to the southwest to
rise into a sharp, bright horizon against the sky. There
were no breakers and no waves. Not a breath of
wind was stirring. Only a slight, oily swell rose and
fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the Colnal
Sea was still moving and living. And all along the
(04:03):
margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation
of salt pink under the lurid sky. There was a
sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed I
was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my
only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the
air to be more rarefied than it is now. Far
(04:24):
away up the desolate slope, I heard a harsh scream
and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go
slanting and fluttering up into the sky and circling disappear
over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice
was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more
firmly upon the machine. Looking around me again, I saw
(04:45):
that quite near what I had taken to be a
reddish mass of rock, was moving slowly towards me, And
then I saw that the thing was really a monstrous
crablike creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as
yond the table, with its many legs eggs, moving slowly
and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae like
Carter's whips waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming
(05:09):
at you on either side of its metallic front. Its
back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a
greenish incrustation blotched it. Here and there. I could see
the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling
as it moved. As I stared at this sinister apparition
calling towards me, I felt a tickling on my cheek,
(05:30):
as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to
brush it away with my hand, but in a moment
it returned, and almost immediately came another behind my ear.
I struck at this and caught something threadlike. It was
drawn swiftly out of my hand and with a frightful choirm.
I turned and saw that I had grasped the antennae
of yet another monster crab that stood just behind me.
(05:52):
Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, Its mouth
was alive with appetite, and its vast, ungainly claws smeared
with an algal slime. There were descending upon me. In
a moment. My hand was on the lever, and I
placed a month between myself and these monsters. But I
was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly. Now,
(06:13):
as soon as I stopped, dozens of them seemed to
be crawling here and there in the somber light, among
the foliated sheets of intense green. I can't convey the
sense of abominable jesolation that hung over the world. The
red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt dead sea,
(06:34):
the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow stirring monsters,
the uniform poisonous green of the likeness plants, the thin
air that hurts one's lungs all contributed to an appalling effect.
I moved on one hundred years, and there was the
same red sun, a little larger, a little duller in
the same dying sea, the same chill in the air,
(06:55):
the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out
among the green weed and the red rocks. And in
the westward sky I saw a curved pale line like
a vast new moon. So I traveled, stopping ever and
again in great strides of a thousand years or more,
(07:15):
drawn on by the mystery of the Earth's fate, watching
with a strange fascination, as the Sun grow larger and
duller than the westward sky, and the life of the
old Earth ebb away. At last more than thirty million years.
Hence the huge red hot dome of the Sun had
come to obscure nearly a tenth of the darking heavens.
(07:38):
And I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of
crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its
livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. Now it was
flecked with white. A bit of cold assailed me. The
rare white flakes, ever again came eddying down to the northeastwards.
A glare of snow lay under the starlight of the
(07:59):
seables sky, and I could see an undulating crest of
hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice among the
sea margin were drifting masses farther out, but the main
expanse of that salt ocean or bloody under the eternal sunset,
was still unfrozen. I looked about me to see if
any traces of animal life remained. A certain indefinable apprehension
(08:23):
still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But
I saw nothing in earth, or sky or sea. The
green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was
not extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea,
and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied
I saw some black object flopping about on this bank,
(08:45):
but it became motionless as I looked at it, and
I judged that my eye had been deceived, and this
little black object was merely a rock. Stars in the
sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle
very little. Soddenly, I noticed the circular westward outline of
the sun had changed, that a concavity a bay had
(09:06):
opened in the curve. I saw this grow larger for
a minute. Perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that
was creeping over the day, And then I realized that
an eclipse was beginning. Either the Moon or the planet
Mercury was passing in front of the Sun's disk naturally.
At first I took it to be the Moon, but
(09:26):
there is much more to incline me to believe that
what I really saw was the transit of an inner
planet passing very near to the Earth. The darkness grew apace,
and a cold wind began to blow in refreshing gusts
from the east, and the showering white flakes in the
air increased in number. From the edge of the sea
came a ripple and a whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds,
(09:50):
the world was silent, silent. It would be hard to
convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man,
all the bleating of sheep, all the cries of birds,
the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background
of our lives, All that was over. As a darkness thickened,
the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes,
(10:10):
and the cold of the air more intense. At last,
one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white
peaks of the distant hills vanished into the blackness. The
breeze rose to a moaning wind, and I saw the
black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In
another moment, the pale stars were alone and visible. All
(10:32):
else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black. The
horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold
that smote to my marrow, and the pain that I
felt in breathing overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly
nausea seized me. Then like a red hot bow in
the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got
(10:54):
off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and
incapable of facing the journey. As I stood, sick and confused,
I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal. There
was no mistake now that it was a moving thing
against the red water of the sea. It was a
round thing, about the size of a football perhaps, or
(11:16):
maybe bigger tentacles trailed down from it. It seemed black
against the weltering blood red water, and it was hopping
fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting, but a
terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful
twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle
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