Optical Speculations in the Early Writings: The Time Machine and the Short Stories

Abstract

This chapter examines Wells's The Time Machine and early short stories. It argues that Wells's Time Traveller models the theory of time as the fourth dimension in terms that parallel the technological extension of the photograph's virtual stereoscopy into filmic movement. The chapter also discusses how Wells's speculations about the far-reaching social, political, and cultural implications of the new visual technology proliferated and are the conscious imaginative drive of the interconnected realism and fantasy in his early stories.