The Time Machines

A guy builds a time machine. Just to test it, he visits the dinosaurs, and from there, in an incredibly poignant scene, not usually included in the first fifty pages of a novel, travels to see his parents after his own birth. Just to gaze through the window as they fawn over his miniature self in the incubator. While eloquently describing the catharsis having to do with parents who died unhappy, Wells manages to slyly remind us how selfish this little trip is.

After returning to his "present," nothing seems to have changed. He waits a couple weeks to make sure, as the implications of his other two trips sink in. Then he goes back to kill Hitler. Of course, my first reaction was, "Okay, he kills Hitler, returns to his own time, and everything has gone horribly, terribly wrong. Just like Back to the Future 2." It's tough, but I manage to hold back the urge to build a fire for the sole purpose of burning this book.

It turns out, big surprise, that a lot of people from all over time have had this brilliant idea. So many terrible things could be averted! But what's the point of going back in time to commit one of the few murders almost no one could blame you for committing if you're just going to watch someone else do it? No matter when he finds himself in Hitler's timeline, someone else is there, trying to beat him to it. The next few weeks of his life degenerate into battles both physical and verbal with people from all over time. It's almost as if that period becomes so important because of all the attention it receives. A self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

Well it turns out that our (anti?)hero is the first human being to ever invent the time machine. Through conversations with travelers from his future, he learns that he never shared the thing with the public (no one knows why), but enough notes and pieces survived for other people to dig up and discover along the way.

Finally he gets fed up with all this business and decides to go back to a point in his timeline before inventing the machine to prevent its creation by crashing into the theater that spawned his final revelation that made time travel possible, right in front of his past self in a fiery ball of doom that annihilates everything before he even starts thinking about building the machine.