The Secret Pilot: H.G. Wells and “The Time Machine”

Let’s begin by erasing the distracting markings on the blackboard from previous discourses on “The Time Machine” – markings that, like some over-suggestive Rorschach blotch, will only make us think of movies and television portrayals of H.G. Well’s most classic tale. Because contrary to everything you’ve probably heard and seen about “The Time Machine,” it’s not a story about a scientist who travels into the future. It’s a story about a man who claims to know a scientist who may have travelled into the future (although he most probably didn’t) but through masterful wordplay and behavioral trickery attempts to convince his audience – succeeding, in fact, with our narrator — that he most definitely made the journey.

Time travel, of course, does occur in the book, but not in the way most people think. Which direction in time does “The Time Machine” take us — forward or back? Both. The Time Traveler (the real Time Traveler) flies into the future, while we fly into the past.

Is “The Time Machine” science fiction? Absolutely not. It’s not even “scientific romance,” as many critics call it.

It’s pure, unadulterated, romantic literature.

Herbert George Wells, or “Bertie” as his parents called him, was lying on what he thought was his deathbed when he conceived the story that would eventually be called “The Time Machine.” As great ideas were gushing from his mind, blood was gushing from his mouth. He was penniless and suffering from severe consumption. The year was 1888. Our Bertie was 22 years old.

Death, however, usually quite punctual for consumptive clients in those days, missed its appointment; and young Bertie, snubbed by the very thing to which he’d resigned himself, was granted permission to travel further into time. Had he died, he would have died completely, because the upstart biologist hadn’t written anything yet and his grand entrance onto the literary stage was still several years into the future. Had he died, we wouldn’t even know the name H.G. Wells. Just imagine!

Bertie had a rambunctious genitalia, and, as he made clear in several books (including a detailed autobiographical account of his many love affairs), it tormented him terribly. The organ was raised and nourished in the most conducive social climate possible – a time of belching iconoclasm, overwhelming questions about human behavior (not just Marx and Engels, but Thomas Huxley, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Ralph Waldo Emerson), the percolations upward of the shocking yet tantalizing observations recorded from Britain’s most distant colonial outposts (Joseph Conrad in Africa, Rudyard Kipling in India) as well as islands of inhabitation even more remote (Charles Darwin, Captain Cook, Herman Melville).

Only that which was scientifically verified was considered valid, leaving everything else — like legislation after a coup, life in Czechoslovakia after the Russians withdrew — open to experiment. Nor was science the thing of utility it is today. Rather, it was the beat of the new step — what music was to the 1960s. A good example, because as demonstrated by the Eloi people in “The Time Machine,” the concept of free love and flower children did not originate in the 1960s. Bertie was dreaming about it and living it — along with many others — eight decades earlier.

In fact, the origin of this classic tale, first serialized as “The Chronic Argonauts” and then transformed seven years later into “The Time Machine,” corresponds with Bertie’s elopement and co-habitation with a Miss Catherine Anne Robbins, a dainty, delicate young female student of his – almost as dainty and delicate as his character, the Time Traveler’s little playmate, Weena…although apparently not dainty and delicate enough for Bertie, who’d find many more Weenas to woo.

Never mind that at the time of the elopement Bertie was legally married to his cousin, Isabel. When asked whether he intended to divorce his wife before marrying “his little doll” (as the Time Traveler also refers to little Weena), Bertie said he no longer believed in marriage. He preferred loving freely and only wished his new partner in love would demonstrate more of his experimental nature in bed. So for all this talk about H.G. Wells being a scientist, or a brilliant inventor, he was first and foremost a lover, with a powerful, insatiable libido.

With this is mind let’s look then at Bertie’s Time Traveler…

Read the rest of this essay…
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“The Time Machine,” by H.G. Wells, is considered a seminal work of science fiction. And yet according to Zireaux, it’s so much more than that. In his highly engaging essay, “The Secret Pilot,” Zireaux makes the case that H.G. Wells’ most famous novel, written when Wells was only 22 years old, is one of the greatest works of literature ever produced. Leading us on a journey from 19th century England to the Pacific Islands, through time travel, love, science and art, Zireaux makes some fascinating insights along the way — including a remarkable revelation (a first-ever discovery?) of what may be the “The Time Machine’s” biggest secret of all.

Related content: The “Leafy Light” of H.G. Wells and an Exchange with Susan Pearce

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