The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. Wells is generally credited with the popularisation of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. Wells had considered the notion of time travel before, in a short story titled "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888).
This work, published in his college newspaper, was the foundation for The Time Machine.Wells frequently stated that he had thought of using some of this material in a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette until the publisher asked him if he could instead write a serial novel on the same theme. Wells readily agreed and was paid £100 (equal to about £11,000 today) on its publication by Heinemann in 1895, which first published the story in serial form in the January to May numbers of The New Review (newly under the nominal editorship of W. E. Henley).[2] Henry Holt and Company published the first book edition (possibly prepared from a different manuscript)[3] on 7 May 1895; Heinemann published an English edition on 29 May.[2] These two editions are different textually and are commonly referred to as the "Holt text" and "Heinemann text", respectively. Nearly all modern reprints reproduce the Heinemann text.[citation needed]The story reflects Wells's own socialist political views, his view on life and abundance, and the contemporary angst about industrial relations. It is also influenced by Ray Lankester's theories about social degeneration and shares many elements with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (1871).[5] Other science fiction works of the period, including Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) and the later film Metropolis (1927), dealt with similar themes.This work is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre. The portion of the novella that sees the Time Traveller in a distant future where the sun is huge and red also places The Time Machine within the realm of eschatology, i.e. the study of the end times, the end of the world, and the ultimate destiny of humankind.The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, in Victorian England, and identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller.

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, satire, biography, and autobiography, and even including two books on recreational war games. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called a "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.[5][6][a]
During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.[7] His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction".[8] Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption - dubbed "Wells's law" - leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!".[9] His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.[10]
Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context.[11] He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist.[12] Novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens,[13]but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. A diabetic, Wells co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK) in 1934