Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Fourth-Dimensional Motorcycle

It shouldn't surprise anyone that I like this book.  Nor that I pounce on any excuse to discuss time travel.  It should also not be surprising to get more than you bargained for with Wells.  Yeah, reading this book is like eating cookies.  But cookies rarely provoke existential quandary and uncommon kinds of social apocalypse.  Not to mention this reprint cover melding Steampunk and Psychadelica circa 1976.  Time is relative, man.

"So I came back.  For a long time, I must have been insensible upon the machine.  The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue... The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed.  The hands spun backward upon the dials...

"He, I know, thought cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.  If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.  But to me, the future is still black and blank - a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story..."

1 comment: