Science fiction
The Time Machine
An inventor travels to the year 802,701 and finds that the future has split humanity in two.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Dinner guests and a machine
Every Thursday, an inventor whose name we never learn has friends to dinner at his house in Richmond, outside London. One evening he shows them a small model of a machine and makes it vanish. A week later he arrives late, dirty, limping and starving, and once he has eaten he tells them where he has been: the year 802,701. He found a world like a garden, inhabited by gentle, childlike people called the Eloi, and a growing sense, night after night, that something else lived underground. It was H. G. Wells’s first novel, published in 1895.
Why it works for learners
It’s short; you can finish it in a week. Almost the whole story is one man’s long, clear account, with a frame of listeners who react as you might. The vocabulary mixes the everyday (food, light, dark, fire, sleep, fear) with simple science (machine, time, future, past, speed). Because the future world is strange, the inventor explains everything he sees and his theories about it, which gives you plenty of context for new words. The ideas are big but simple: class, comfort, evolution.
Which level to start at
B1 is ideal, and A2 is possible for a reader who wants a short, strange first novel. B2 and the higher levels keep more of Wells’s precise descriptions and the haunting final chapters. Read-along highlighting helps keep you anchored through the long monologue.
Read next
- The War of the Worlds, Wells’s Martian invasion
- The First Men in the Moon, Wells at his most comic
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, time travel in the other direction