The Accidental Time Machine - Parallelisms and Comparisons With H.G. Wells's Time Machine

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