Week Nine: The Final Frontier


   


    When I was in high school I made it my goal to read something from Jules Verne and HG Wells because I watched a dvd commentary on Atlantis: The Lost Empire and the creators aimed the movie to feel like one from a Verne/Wells novel. So I read “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “The Time Machine”. I quickly realized why they used the books for inspiration as both authors are very good at doing unexplored worlds within our normal world. Both books are speculative but feel grounded with plausibility.
     “The Time Machine” became my favorite because of it’s speculation of where humanity as species will go if we continue with our classism issue. The divide has gotten so great that different lifestyles have created different human species, the helpless Eloi and the predatory Morlocks. “The Time Machine” suggests that the lower class will be driven underground and will become nocturnal hunters of the upper class who have become small and weak because of a cushy lifestyle. This makes sense when you consider H.G. Wells lived during late Victorian England, and so would see a huge difference in lifestyles between the rich living decadently and the poor being negatively affected by their environment. I think Wells’ critique of society has it’s place here now more than ever with how much we know and have researched about the effects of living in poverty to one’s health.
     Despite these books talking about new frontiers and unexplored areas, they used these things to say something about the condition of humanity.

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