The Time Machine illustrated

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a science fiction classic, which lends itself well to visualization. This version, illustrated by Yoann Laurent-Rouault, an illustrator master who graduated from the Beaux-Arts, and published in the international literary collection Memoria Books, is a reference on the time travel theme.

Wells transports us in the year 802 701, in a society made up of the “Elois”, who live peacefully in a kind of big Garden of Eden, eating fruits and sleeping high up, while underground lives another species, also descending from men, the “Morlocks”, who do not stand the light anymore, living in the dark for too long now. At night, they return to the surface, going back up by the wells, in order to kidnap some Elois that they eat ; these last became livestock unknowingly.

In The Time Machine, made into a movie several times, the last of them in 2002 by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells, time is both a pretext to move the class struggle and warn… and also, in a way, a full character, who fascinates, arbitrates, transcends… The illustrations come to reinforce the time travel and provide a new experience to the reader.