at the end of chapter X, he moves forward in time, and in chapter XI, reaches the end of his journey, when “more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens” (p.76). So Wells himself found the “million years or less” assessment too short and brought the number up to thirty million. Even here, life persists, if only in the form of some green slime and a disgusting creature somewhere between an octopus and a spider scuttling along the shore of a freezing sea. The Eloi and Morlocks are by then extinct, and the pitiable life-forms that have adapted to the world’s last days are mercifully unconscious of their imminent doom.

For Wells, the tragedy of human and natural entropic evolution is the loss of human consciousness. It is this fall from awareness that Wells uses to characterize the Eloi and the Morlocks. Wells may have derived his visual idea of this ghastly utopia from Hieronymous Bosch’s painting Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500). In that triptych, the left panel shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, while on the right we see Hell. The strange center panel depicts masses of virtually hairless beings, at least one of which is eating a huge piece of fruit (not unlike the Eloi’s “hypertrophied raspberry” on p.24) and playing (often obscenely) with flowers. Like the Eloi and Morlocks, Bosch’s humanity is locked in a mindless repetition of pleasure—the Eloi dance in the sun, and the Morlocks feast on them in the darkness. Neither group is aware of a before or an after, which is why neither group is even slightly interested in finding out who the Time Traveller is, where he came from, or why he is there. He is an anomaly, but these subhumans have no curiosity about him or anything beyond what satisfies their immediate needs.

Wells sees an ironic parallel between nature and human history in The Time Machine: With its needs satisfied, humanity, like the decadents of the fin de siècle will become ever more effeminate, less and less interested in anything whatsoever, until finally its intellect atrophies. So there will have to be a constant goad prodding humanity onward. Wells can only imagine this in terms of cataclysm—war or invasion from another planet—and in his search for a new subject turns his attention back to himself. That is, his Time Traveller is a man obsessed who transforms his obsession—time as the fourth dimension of space—into a fact by inventing a fantastic machine that is capable of moving through time. Wells, following in Mary Shelley’s footsteps, makes not the slightest attempt to explain what energy drives the time machine or even how it is able to traverse time at such amazing speeds.

Wells’s new subject, yet another self-portrait in a distorting mirror, appears in the second fiction in this volume. The Invisible Man uses yet another obsessed man of science, but this time Wells toys with the idea of plausibility. That is, Griffin, the invisible man, explains how he is able to capitalize on his own albinism to reduce the amount of light his body reflects to the point where human eyes cannot see him. It would almost seem as though Wells were succumbing to Jules Verne’s notion of plausibility, but we quickly realize this is not the case. Griffin’s albinism (pp.172—173) is merely the outward sign of his difference from others, a difference we might suppose to be quantitative—some people are lighter-skinned than others—but which turns out to be qualitative. What separates Griffin from the rest of humanity is exactly the element that separates Wells’s early version of the Time Traveller from the rest of humanity: genius.

But genius is intoxicating. It sends the ego into raptures of self-delight and isolates the individual further and further from anything like a human community. This is the tale Wells spins out in The Invisible Man: the gradual metamorphosis of genius into madness. Again, this is not a unique story. The Romantics, especially William Wordsworth (1770—1850) in his poem “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a, Yew Tree” (1795), explore this very theme, while Wells’s model, Mary Shelley, provides him with the nucleus of his novel—the solitary scientist, the potentially dangerous invention pursued for egotistical purposes.

So The Invisible Man is a cautionary tale the author writes for his generation and for himself. When we forget that we too are merely human, when we take ourselves to be something