The Time Machine
The Time Traveller, a dreamer obsessed with traveling through time, builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future. He lands in the year 802701: the world has been transformed by a society living in apparent harmony and bliss, but as the Traveler stays in the future he discovers a hidden barbaric and depraved subterranean class. Wells's transparent commentary on the capitalist society was an instant bestseller and launched the time-travel genre.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
44mentions
43people
2007–2026years
11% recommend89% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I don't know if I really even believe in the idea of "must read" books, but here are at least a few I highly recommend. In no particular order.
FICTION
The Mysterious Island - Verne
The Time Machine - Wells
Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury
Brave New World - Huxley
Snow Crash - Stephenson
The Shockwave Rider - Brunner
The Fountainhead - Rand
Cryptonomicon - Stephenson
The Foundation trilogy - Asimov
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Bradbury
Strangers - Koontz
After Dark - Murakami
It - King
The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
The Hobbit - Tolkien
Perdido Street Station - Miéville
Permutation City - Egan
Glasshouse - Stross
NON-FICTION
Report from Engine Co 82 - Smith
Godel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter
How the Mind Works - Pinker
The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Blank
Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady - Bly
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Levy
Artificial Life - Levy
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Haffner & Markoff (Note: this book is not without controvery. There is a lot of debate about the veracity of much of the material on Mitnick. However, it is a wildly entertaining read, and an introduction to a number of interesting characters. But I'd suggest following up by reading other related titles, especially regarding Kevin Mitnick)
Ghost in the Wires - Mitnick (Mitnick's autogiography, basically)
Takedown - Shimomura & Markoff
The Fugitive Game - Littman (of the books written about Mitnick, but not by Mitnick, this one has a reputation for being a little more "pro Kevin" whereas a couple of the others are sort of pointedly "anti Kevin" in their bias. Maybe it all balances out in the end if you read them all).
The Cyberthief & the Samurai - Goodell
The Cuckoo's Egg - Stoll
How To Create A Mind - Kurzweil
On Intelligence - Hawkins
Engineering General Intelligence (volumes 1 & 2) - Goertzel
The Hidden Pattern - Goertzel
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity - Wallace
- If the survival of a single person is "high stakes" in fiction, then what do you even consider "low stakes"?
> I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.
You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try, say, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Grapes of Wrath, The Time Machine, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Foundation series, anything by Ray Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.
- The Phantom Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales, Rudyard Kipling. This is the one that includes "The Man Who Would be King" that's a fairly well known film with Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
His other short story books, such as The Jungle Book and Just So Stories - so much better than the Disney.
The Time Machine and other Stories, H G Wells.
- You just described the plot of The Time Machine by H G Wells.
I also recommend the movie (the original).
- Fiction:
- The Time Machine (still holds up very well, and seems strangely eerie and prescient in places)... (H. G. Wells)
- Dune (Frank Herbert)
- The Hobbit (and LotR) (Tolkien)
- Neuromancer (William Gibson)
- Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties (I picked up Idoru first, so I haven't yet read Virtual Light) (also Gibson)
- The Difference Engine (Gibson, Sterling)
- Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
- Cryptonomicon (" ")
- Circuit of Heaven, End of Days (Dennis Danvers)
- All of the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories and novels. (Fritz Leiber)
- The Earthsea trilogy (Ursula K. LeGuin)
- 'salem's Lot (Stephen King)
- Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
- the Coldfire trilogy (C. S. Friedman)
- various Cory Doctorow short stories
- Kamikaze L'Amour (Richard Kadrey)
- Lightpaths (Howard V. Hendrix)
- A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)
- Moonwar, Venus (Ben Bova)
- the Stainless Steel Rat series (Harry Harrison)
- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Ringworld (Larry Niven)
- Cthon (Piers Anthony) -- Trippiness level approaching Philip Jose Farmer ;-)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)
- The Black Company (Glen Cook)
- there's one particularly good post-cyberpunk series that takes place in a world in which Canada emerged as a major world power, but for the life of me I can't rememeber the title.
- the 1632 series (Eric Flint)... see also S. M. Stirling's Nantucket series ("Island in the Sea of Time", et al.), and H. Beam Piper's novel Kalvan of Otherwhen
Non-fiction:
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume)
- the surviving words and works of Epicurus, and Diogenes the Cynic
- Freakonomics (Levitt, Dubner)
- The Gay Science (Nietzsche)
- The Jefferson Bible (Christ, Jefferson (ed.))
- The Devil's Dictionary (Bierce)
- Brain Droppings (George Carlin)
- anything by P. J. O'Rourke
- anything by Dave Barry
- H.G Wells Time Machine has future society split into to: the childish consumer class and the driven engineering class, and the consumer class is the food of the engineering class. I could see this happening, with how cruel so many are, and trying to institutionalize that attitude.
