BookTalk.org

Please use this thread to discuss the above referenced chapters.

These chapters are mainly introductory, to demonstrate that the Time Traveler has a Theory and is therefore a Serious Person. The disappearing apparatus is a nice teaser. But what we are mainly introduced to are characters. I fear they are rather two dimensional.

The intrigue around the Time Traveler himself, with the suggestion that he is too clever by half and can't be trusted not to be playing some manipulative game, appears to be just a backhanded way of smuggling some depth into his character.

The Psychologist seems to have some reflective role to play, which may suggest that Wells is bent on exploring something vital about psychology, or at least that he is intrigued by something psychologists have uncovered.

The others strike me as sort of stick figures, present mainly for a variety of perspectives on the subject matter.

I'm surprised by all the attention he pays to exotic materials. I suppose it gives us some insight into the time, when chemistry was beginning to be a kind of real-life wizardry and science was an odd combination of emerging order, such as with the periodic table, and residual chaos, such as Kelvin's conclusion that thermodynamics proved the earth to be much younger than the geologists believed. Wikipedia says Wells was scientifically trained, so presumably he is not just throwing in colorful hints of exotic mumbo-jumbo.

Obviously the real scientific content is meant to be captured by the notion of time being "just another dimension." Wells shows some sophistication with the handling of that idea, but doesn't have anything genuine to use it for. He is in between the faithful use of science by "hard" SciFi writers like Asimov, Anderson and Campbell, and "social" SciFi like Ray Bradbury or like Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land."