Friday, October 2, 2009

The book before the book before the new book

I was about to begin on Audrey Niffenegger's new title Her Fearful Symmetry, hearing the soft song of "Tiger, Tiger" in the background, when I saw on the cover that the new book is a follow-on to The Time Traveller's Wife strongly recommended to be read first. On the way to The Time Traveller's Wife I realized I'd never read The Time Traveller, known to us now by its revised name The Time Machine. So tonight I picked up The Time Machine, expecting perhaps a less worthy version of Looking Backward. Was I surprised.

H. G. Wells brought out the first edition of The Time Machine in 1895. As expected he deals with the question of the political future: what would be the evolution of the Haves and the Have-Nots, and were the Communists right that theirs was the destiny of history? Not surprisingly he follows the racial philosophy of traditional Western Civilization: the Negro remains essentially tribal and based in Africa, the evil menace lies beneath us and the Fruitarians above who call themselves Eloi enjoy the inheritance of Classical Greece, empty temples and all. The lonely bachelor scientist finds love, or at least affection, in another dimension and finds it no trouble at all to choose bliss over progress.

But would we have expected the stunningly accurate picture of global warming that's here? The little people who are obviously literary forerunners of Hobbits and their menacing Morlocks whom Tolkien readers will instantly identify with ringwraiths? The first flight into the fourth dimension with its compressing chill already familiar to anyone who grew up on Madeleine L'Engle?

What totally astonished me is the date -- 1895. Wells writes, "There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space." He's a quarter century ahead of Einstein, who began with the mechanics of time and space to show that there is no difference between matter and energy. Albert Einstein won all the big prizes for the theory of relativity published in 1920. It sure seems like H. G. Wells should get some of the credit.

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