The Time traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
With these words began the long and brilliant literary career of Herbert George Wells, H. G. to his public, Bertie to his friends, as well as one of the most remarkable novels and dazzling original concepts ever written—The Time Machine.
   I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking around, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!
   He gets a bit more adventurous.
Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue; a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space, the moon a fainter, fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue…
…Presently I noted that the sun-belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that, consequently, my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring…

   The detail is marvellous in this extraordinary journey.
…I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings in my own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and remain there without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind came around to the business of stopping.
   Thousands of years in the future, he encounters the gentle human folk living in what appears to be paradisiacal circumstances, until he realises that they have everything provided for them because they are human cattle, food for the troglodyte Morlocks, hairy and wicked and yet curiously intelligent. After a time trying to help the humans fight back against the Morlocks, he is lucky to escape, further into the future. He arrives at a time when the earth has slowly stopped rotating, the green of spring has ceased, and slimy creatures are the only life left as the sun becomes a red giant and advances to swallow the earth.
I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs; all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved a hundred years and there was the same red sun—a little larger, a little duller—the same dying sea…
   The stars go out, the sun fills the sky, the air goes cold, he turns around and heads for home. When he gets there, no one believes him. A friend completes the tale for him.
A gust of air whirled around me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment—a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Traveller had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty.
   One of the most wonderful adventures ever imagined.
   George Pal, while we are on the subject, was a puppeteer who turned his hand to special effects movies and produced two great classics from HG Wells’ most famous works—The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. These outstanding creations are true to Wells and the effects are brilliantly done. As the time traveller creeps forward into the future, the changes are created with the same fine and emotive detail that Wells did. Rarely is a great author so honoured by a film-maker.

   Of the book of The Time Machine, of which I adore every word, the best bit is at the end when the unnamed time traveller goes forward into the distant future and witnesses the final days of earth’s existence before it is swallowed by the red giant sun. I checked up and of course Wells didn’t lie—should the earth happen to avert the nuclear holocaust and miss all collisions with other bodies in the solar system, still it is doomed anyway, to die with its sun. The Age of Destruction lay before me, and I still thought it a wonder.