The Time Machine is the great, gleeful anarchist novel of the 1890s. It is both a thrilling adventure story and a satire on religion, evolution and human hopes. With this book, Wells invented an entirely new genre and did it better than any of his imitators.

An immediate bestseller, it has delighted and unnerved generations of readers, and will no doubt keep on doing so until some of the events predicted in the book make readers extinct.