10101 and The Time Machine

H.G. Wells The Time Machine is one of my favorite science fiction novellas. Written in 1895, it tells the tale of the Time Traveller, a genius inventor who builds a machine that takes him to the year 802,700, and the observations he makes along with his encounters with the creatures of the future.

I chose a question mark as the representation of this novella for the simple reasoning that time — past, current, and future — is a question. People debate that time isn’t real, that it’s merely a social construct. People debate time and it’s relation to evolution, both what has happened and what will happen. Whilst H.G. Wells novella is a fascinating tale, it’s simply the answer to a question a man had at the end of the 19th century as to what would happen to the Earth with the rise of industrialization.

“Time” is the most prevalent word, but the three words that stuck out to me the most in this analysis were right below this: “one,” “came,” and “upon,” specifically if you put the three together. One came upon. It made me think on how historical information is presented to us in a similar manor. Christopher Columbus came upon, England came upon, and so on.

Above these words are descriptive words relating to the body. White, black, hand, face, human, things. Throughout the novel there is juxtaposition of upper versus lower class and how drastic the division has become. Upon first glance there were no visible struggles, as the environmental and social future H.G. Wells imagined was a paradise, a true utopia. He dubs these people living in a lap of luxury the Eloi, who are described as pure, radiant, white creatures. Later in the novel it is revealed that a sect of humans has been living below ground for thousands of generations, the Morlocks. The Morlocks take on the role of the working-class citizen that has been removed from sight of the upper-class as a result of an ever-growing class distinction. The surface of the Earth is only a paradise because the work has moved out of sight.

There’s a lot more that could be analyzed just from this word cloud, but I must say the grouping of words that stood out to me did not strike me as being random.