A review by pocketsknight
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

adventurous dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

A scientist has mad a time machine. He tells his dinner guests what he found in the future. I liked this better than the single other book by H. G. Wells that I've read (The War of the Worlds). But like that other book I think it would have interested me a lot more if I had better knowledge of its cultural and litterary context. Said another way, H. G. Wells was exceptional in his time and has since been largely overtaken. This make his books most interesting as a reflexion of how people thought in his time, about the future, about science. 
The premise of what happened to humans in the future is obviously unrealistic, which makes it weaker and less interesting than it could have been (divergences of that magnitude could only really have happened if humans were put in different and mutually inaccessible environments), but it is an interesting thought experiment. There is some unpleasant talk about "savages", a single female character that is even worse than the average femal characters in adventure books from the 1800s tend to be, and the main character is an arrogant, unpleasant man who I'm fairly certain isn't meant to be. I found some parts of this to be genuinly interesting and other parts to be genuinely creepy (a good thing).
Read this if you like others H. G. Wells, I suppose, or if you are passionate about the history of sci-fi as a genre.