Before You Begin

Before you begin.

It begins with an after-dinner argument by firelight. A man his friends call only the Time Traveller sets a small glittering model of ivory and brass upon the table, presses a little white lever, and watches it flicker out of existence. A week later he staggers into the same room — pale, limping, dusty — with an impossible story to tell: he has been to the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One, and he has come back changed.

H. G. Wells was a young writer trained in biology when he published The Time Machine in 1895, and it made him famous overnight. He took the new sciences of his age — evolution, geology, the slow cooling of the sun — and pushed them to their furthest, coldest conclusions, inventing the very idea of the time machine along the way. More than a century later the book still reads as the blueprint for nearly every story of time travel that followed.

What the Traveller finds is not paradise but a riddle: a gentle, beautiful people called the Eloi who play and never work, and a pale, subterranean race called the Morlocks who keep the daylight world running for reasons he is slow and unwilling to understand. Between sunlit decay and underground dread, one small Eloi named Weena becomes his single thread of human warmth.

This illustrated edition gathers the tale into six visual movements — recap plates you unlock as you read, each drawing together the characters, places, and turns of the story so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page and step into the gallery — the cast, the far future, the White Sphinx, and the dying beach at the end of the world — before you take your own seat by the fire and hear the tale.