Morlocks Ahoy

Every so often I read some techno-goggle-eyed stupidity like this:
I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do – it sparks the imagination!
What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can’t even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50! … Let’s put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.

Someone apparently liked The new Time Machine movie…

As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells’ original, it was the Morlocks’ love of machines and enslavement to the idea of “mechanical progress” that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.

The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well’s book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they’d won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened. Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal’s film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.

The Time Machine is here. The end-of-the-earth chapter is a perfect little End-Of-Colonialism piece, very typical of the time. Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, Night Land, and Stapledon’s Last and First Men are more of the same, but with their own charms.

`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes — to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection — absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.