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While Mary Shelley wrote the first true science fiction novel, H.G. Wells wrote the first true time travel novel. The Time Machine would become the basis for all future time travel stories, but it nearly wasn’t so.
Before being published as a complete book in May 1845, The Time Machine was published as serials in The New Review between January and May of the same year. That publication folded, and so the science fiction author got to work on putting everything together in a complete book. However, everything about it changed.
There was a much darker history to the story. When it was serialized, it told the story of a man who escaped a mob of angry people with a time machine. It certainly felt a little more Frankenstein when you consider the angry people had pitchforks, and they were trying to chase the inventor, Nebogipfel, off. The difference was that rather than create a monster (and realize that he’d done wrong with his creation), Nebogipfel was a serial killer escaping the murders he had committed.
Interestingly, this is a storyline used in Time After Time, the abruptly canceled ABC series that starred Freddie Stroma as H.G. Wells and Jack Bowman as Dr. John Stevenson/Jack the Ripper. In this series, Wells had a time machine in his home, which Stevenson stole to be able to escape capture for his crimes, along with other dastardly reasons.
In real life, Wells realized that his science fiction novel didn’t need the dark horror plot. As he rewrote the serials, he took out the murder mystery and serial killer arc, knowing that time travel was already a big enough draw. After all, it would become the first true time travel novel that would shape this part of the genre for years to come.
He decided to pivot to class warfare and evolutionary theory, with a focus on how capitalism and the social divides in the Victorian era would eventually lead to the destruction of society, and we get to see that in the post-apocalyptic world traveled to in the novel.
While The Time Machine would become a popular book and start the time-travel genre, it wouldn’t become Wells’s most popular book. That would be War of the Worlds, although the iconic radio production of it arguably led to that happening.
