Anyone read the book?
Or anything from HG Wells?
shareYes, I've read the book, as well as The Island of Dr. Moreau and various other Wells short stories. (I used to have an entire collection on audiocassette.) It's been a while since I've read Wells, but The Time Machine was, at least at one point, one of my favorite books. (I'm not sure how well it would hold up if I read it today.)
shareI re-read not too long ago, and for me, it does hold up. Especially the final portion, which to my knowledge no film seems to have depicted—that terminal beach thousands of years after the time of the Eloi & Morlocks, all desolate wasteland by a dark sea, with flakes of snow falling from a black sky of perpetual night—still powerful!
shareIIRC as the Traveler is standing there at the end of Earth's time in that desolate landscape, his cheek is tickled and he turns to see these spider/crab things crawling along the beach... the only visible life left. That's when he leaves the future in despair and returns to his present.
He returns just long enough to recount his adventures to his visitor then leaves in the Time Machine again for the future. He doesn't return when expected and the book ends with his visitor waiting anxiously for him, but fearing the worst.
I think you're right, as I'm going from memory of those last pages, and may well be conflating a couple of different scenes.
shareInteresting. Have been trying to get it on kindle but looks like there are only adaptations available. Is it true the book is less than 100 pages?
shareYes, it's really more of a novella. But it packs a lot into that relatively small number of pages.
Here's a link for Project Gutenberg that has the complete original text:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35/35-h/35-h.htm
AND - You can get a lot of Wells there in multiple formats: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=herbert+george+wells&submit_search=Go%21
AND - If you want audio, there's Librivox for free audio books: https://librivox.org/author/146?primary_key=146&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results