The Time Machine: Unabridged (Penguin Modern Classics) Cassette

Herbert George Wells had a shoddy education, worked unwillingly as a draper's assistant and then as a chemist's assistant, for which he acquired sufficient Latin in a five-hour burst of study. He then studied science and became a teacher, but was rendered semi-invalid by a football accident, and was finally forced into authorship by a burst blood-vessel in his lungs. A born fighter, he immediately produced The Time Machine, which is now regarded as the best of all his books, and whose intellectual audacity is extraordinary, given the primitive scientific ambiance of 1895. The inventor-hero announces to a group of friends that the geometry they learned at school was a misconception, and promises--despite their incredulity--that he will prove experimentally that time is the fourth dimension. He produces a minute machine, points out two levers marked "past" and "future" and presses one, whereupon the model grows indistinct and then vanishes. He then shows them the full-scale machine in which he himself will time-travel. Eight days later he reappears dirty, hungry, bleeding, and exhausted: with poetic intensity he describes the sun jerking from solstice to solstice while the moon spins through her quarters. The world he has visited was divided into a soft, idle aristocracy and a vicious underclass of murderous workers: in other words, a powerful social allegory reflecting his own innate radicalism. Brian Cox's reading is both convincing and gripping, as he relives his helpless headlong flight to the world of AD 802701.--Betty TadmanRead More