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1-Page Summary of The Time Machine

A group of men is listening to a man explain his theory that time is the fourth dimension. The man produces a miniature time machine and makes it disappear into thin air, then returns the next week looking disheveled and tired. He begins telling them about his journey through time in the future, where he saw people eating dinner at long tables with no chairs or tablecloths but drinking wine from bowls like children would use for cereal.

The Time Traveller finishes building his time machine and uses it to travel into the future. He arrives in a paradise where he is given food by small humanoid creatures called Eloi. In the night, he sees ape-like creatures lurking around and begins to think that they live underground. When one of them drowns in a river, he saves her life and names her Weena. He goes down into their world at night with matches as protection against the Morlocks (the white ape-like creatures). The Time Traveller escapes from them but finds himself in an old museum full of valuable artifacts, including more matches for defense against the Morlocks’ attacks. That night, when attacked again by another group of Morlocks after starting a fire during battle with some other Morlocks who were hunting him and Weena, he kills many more of them before escaping back up to his time machine’s pedestal after Weena dies from being shot by one of the surviving white apes who was trying to kill him because they feared that if they let him go free then there would be no prey left for them or something like that so I’m not really sure how all that worked out but anyway point is there are still lots of things about this story which I don’t understand but what do you expect from someone who wrote it over 100 years ago?

The Time Traveler goes to several more places, including a beach where he’s attacked by giant crabs. He then travels 30 million years into the future and sees something that resembles a black blob with tentacles. The next day, he leaves again but never returns.

Chapters 1 and 2

A man named the Time Traveller is talking to a group of guests. He explains that time is another dimension, and that we can move forward in it just like we can in space. A small device he shows them proves this by moving into the future at great speeds, but not being visible because it’s going too fast for us to see. The Time Traveller then shows his guests a much larger machine with which he plans to travel through time.

The narrator doesn’t believe the Time Traveller, because he is a very intelligent man who likes to play elaborate practical jokes. The next week at dinner, the same guests are there and some new ones have arrived. They’re instructed to begin without their host, but when he arrives he’s covered in dust and dishevelled from travelling through time. He quickly drinks champagne then goes upstairs to wash up. The narrator suggests that his host has been travelling in time and everyone laughs it off as an absurd notion until they hear what happened during his travels through time.

Chapters 3 and 4

The Time Traveler gets on his machine and pushes the lever forward a little bit. He feels dizzy, and when he looks at the clock in his lab, he sees that five hours have passed. Then he presses the lever more forward. Night and day fly by quickly, until it seems like days are passing in seconds. Soon there is no sign of any buildings or even the sun going across the sky as it moves up and down with the seasons. There is only an overwhelming feeling of motion without direction or purpose to it all. It becomes terrifying to him because he’s worried about landing where something solid already exists (and getting killed) if he stops moving so fast, so instead of stopping to think about what’s happening around him, he pulls back on the lever just enough to stop flying through space but still keep moving faster than normal time would allow for—but not fast enough that everything goes black again before hitting something solid if that were possible; however this means flying headlong into whatever might be ahead of him through nothingness without knowing exactly what will happen next either way…