This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
A Victorian gentleman builds a machine of brass, ivory and quartz, sits in the saddle, and pushes the lever. The drawing room dissolves. Outside the window, day and night flicker past like the beating of a wing, and the house crumbles into a garden that becomes a world he does not recognise.

H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, and it invented most of the rules that time-travel stories have used ever since. It is a short book - you can finish it in an afternoon - but it does three things at once. It is a travel narrative, in which the Traveller explores a distant future the way an explorer might map a new continent. It is a puzzle, in which the reader pieces together what happened to humanity from clues scattered across the landscape. And it is an argument, still unsettling today, about where comfort and ease might lead a species.

What the Traveller finds in the year 802,701 is not a utopia. The Eloi are beautiful, gentle and entirely helpless; the Morlocks are strong, patient and entirely without pity. They are the same species, split by eight hundred thousand years of comfort above ground and labour below. Wells wrote the book in the 1890s, at the height of the class anxieties of industrial England, and its central image - the pretty surface and the machine room underneath - has never stopped being readable.

The prose is plain and fast, with the Traveller telling the story to a circle of sceptical friends by a fire. Wells keeps the science deliberately vague: the point is not the mechanism but where it takes you. The final movement, in which the Traveller goes further than any of the earlier chapters, is among the strangest passages in English fiction.

This unabridged recording uses the complete original 1895 text, including the epilogue. Narrated in a single voice by Alex Mercer.