Classics Fantasy Fiction Literature Novels Science Fiction Time Travel

Four Masterworks (1895‒1898) #1

The Time Machine / The Invisible Man

Name: The Time Machine / The Invisible Man
Rating: 4.1 (56555 reviews)
Author: H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells October 2, 2007

4.1 56.6k Ratings

Ongoing Status

14 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

Unique Elements
Two of Wells’s best-loved science fiction novels

The Time Machine , H. G. Wells ’s first novel, was published in 1895. It is a tale of Darwinian evolution taken to its extreme. Its protagonist, a young scientist, travels 800,000 years into the future and discovers a dying earth inhabited by two bizarre humanoid the brutal Morlocks and the kind but nearly helpless Eloi.

The Invisible Man, first published in 1897 , tells the story of an adventurous scientist discovering the formula for invisibility—a secret that drives him mad. It combines chilling terror, suspense, and acute psychological insight.

Books similar to The Time Machine / The Invisible Man

The Sirens of Titan

★ 4.15

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there's a catch to the invitation—and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.

The Book of the New Sun

★ 4.24

Gene Wolfe

Recently voted the greatest fantasy of all time, after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is an extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, on an Earth transformed in mysterious and wondrous ways, in a time when our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian, the central character, is a torturer, exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his victims, and journeying to the distant city of Thrax, armed with his ancient executioner's sword, Terminus Est. This edition contains the first four volumes of the series.

The End of Eternity

★ 4.24

Isaac Asimov

Andrew Harlan is an Eternal, a man whose job it is to range through past and present Centuries, monitoring and, where necessary, altering Time's myriad cause-and-effect relationships. But when Harlan meets and falls for a non-Eternal woman, he seeks to use the awesome powers and techniques of the Eternals to twist time for his own purposes, so that he and his love can survive together.

The Citadel of the Autarch

★ 4.25

Gene Wolfe

Severian the Torturer, possessor of the miracle-producing gem, the Claw of the Conciliator, experiences strange adventures as he journeys across the savage land of Urth

A Clockwork Orange

★ 4

Anthony Burgess

A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. And when the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?"

This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

Kindred

★ 4.31

Octavia E. Butler

The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

The Foundation Trilogy

★ 4.42

Isaac Asimov

Foundation begins a new chapter in the story of man's future. As the Old Empire crumbles into barbarism throughout the million worlds of the galaxy, Hari Seldon and his band of psychologists must create a new entity, the Foundation-dedicated to art, science, and technology-as the beginning of a new empire.

Foundation and Empire describes the mighty struggle for power amid the chaos of the stars in which man stands at the threshold of a new enlightened life which could easily be destroyed by the old forces of barbarism.

Second Foundation follows the Seldon Plan after the First Empire's defeat and describes its greatest threat-a dangerous mutant strain gone wild, which produces a mind capable of bending men's wills, directing their thoughts, reshaping their desires, and destroying the universe.

This adaptation for BBC Radio 4 was first broadcast in 1973 with a cast which included Lee Montague, Maurice Denham, John Justin, Angela Plesence, Wolfe Morris, Julian Glover and Prunella Scales.

Gravity’s Rainbow

★ 4.01

Thomas Pynchon

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative, and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

The Time Machine / The Invisible Man

More in Four Masterworks (1895‒1898) Series

The Time Machine

The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Invisible Man

The War of the Worlds