Parallelisms and Comparisons With H.G. Wells's Time Machine
Haldeman refers to H.G. Wells's classic novel The Time Machine in a brief reference about its protagonist and the Morlock creatures encountered while time traveling (The Accidental Time Machine page 15). The title of Haldeman’s novel itself is both an allusion to and a play on the title of Wells’s novel. The major difference is that Wells’s protagonist purposefully constructs his time machine, while Haldeman’s character simply stumbles upon it.
Similarities:
- Both have innocent/ignorant female characters who are saved by the male protagonist
- Both have Caucasian, middle-class, heterosexual protagonists who are scientific experts that travel forwards in time by themselves. Furthermore, both seem to belong in the 1890s, which is where Wells’s Time Traveler starts and Matt Fuller ends.
- Both illustrate human devolution in the future
- Both have negative consequence of stagnation (indicative that if a society lapses into complete comfort, devolution occurs)
- Both have doubtful exterior influences:
- Wells's Time Machine: Time Traveller doubted by his peers
- Accidental Time Machine: Matt is doubted by Professor Marsh
- Both encounter seemingly Utopian societies, but quickly realize that they are in fact dystopian
- Both are social commentaries on possible avenues humankind could take on the road to devolution
- Both critique society, albeit in different forms. In The Time Machine, it is in the form of the dinner guests as vehicles of satire. In The Accidental Time Machine, Haldeman uses the different time periods to critique topics such as religion, nature, and so on.
- Both protagonists and the concept of time travel are doubted by those around them in the time periods that they originate from.
- Both time machines work, but with some uncertainty and are vulnerable to theft and breakage
Differences:
- The time machine is discovered accidentally in Haldeman’s novel, while it is consciously constructed by the time traveler in Wells’s
- The Time Machine focuses on class divisions while The Accidental Time Machine focuses on religious and political issues
Read more about this topic: The Accidental Time Machine
Famous quotes containing the words comparisons, wells, time and/or machine:
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“Yes, that’s what I needed. Living flesh from humans for my experiments. What difference did it make if a few people had to die? Their flesh taught me how to manufacture arms, legs, faces that are human. I’ll make a crippled world whole again.”
—Robert Tusker, and Michael Curtiz. Wells (Preston Foster)
“Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal
toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost
ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust
would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“I brush my hair,
waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard,
for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart
and were screwed together. They will knit.
And the other corpse, the fractured heart,
I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I’m good to it.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)