The Time Machine (1895)

H. G. Wells, Mark F. Smith · 1895 · 219 min

The book that invented the time machine as a machine — before Wells, you got to the future by dreaming or by being enchanted; after him, you built something with levers. The Traveller goes to the year 802,701 and finds humanity split into the pretty, useless Eloi above ground and the Morlocks who feed on them below, and Wells lets his narrator get the explanation wrong twice before he gets it right. Then he goes further, to a beach at the end of the world, and the last thirty pages are as bleak as anything in the century that followed. Under four hours; a novella, and it does not waste a chapter.

Mark F. Smith's reading is clear and dry, which is what the Traveller's after-dinner narration wants.

Chosen reading: LibriVox solo production (version 2), read by Mark F. Smith; Internet Archive item time_machine_ms_librivox — 12 files contiguously numbered (timemachine_01_wells.mp3 … timemachine_12_wells.mp3), 210 MB, 3 h 39 min total, catalogued 2011-07-09.

The reading follows the twelve-chapter division of the Holt text, with the Epilogue folded into the last file (the item's own section titles say so). No gaps, no duplicates. The collection holds six other complete readings; this one carries a CC0 dedication in its own metadata and a reader the shelf already trusts.

Published on the source's record rather than a listen-through (owner decision, 2026-08-26): LibriVox proof-listens every completed project chapter by chapter before release, and the three pilots' full listens turned up nothing their project pages had not already said — so the chapter table and byte check above are the verification, and the first listener who finds a fault in this reading should write to the Den.

Two layers, both clear:

• The book. Published 1895 (Heinemann in London, Henry Holt in New York); Wells died in 1946, but the US term for a work published in 1895 expired long before that matters. Inside the pre-1931 line on either side of the Atlantic.
• The narration. LibriVox dedicates its recordings to the public domain; the item carries a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 dedication. Recorded 2011 by Mark F. Smith, credited on the project page.