The Time Machine

Sequels by other authors

Wells' novella has become one of the cornerstones of science-fiction literature. As a result, it has spawned many offspring. Works expanding on Wells' story include:
•   The Return of the Time Machine by Egon Friedell, printed in 1972, from the 1946 German version. The author portrays himself as a character searching for the Time Traveller in different eras.
•   The Hertford Manuscript by Richard Cowper, first published in 1976. It features a "manuscript" which reports the Time Traveller's activities after the end of the original story. According to this manuscript, the Time Traveller disappeared because his Time Machine had been damaged by the Morlocks without him knowing it. He only found out when it stopped operating during his next attempted time travel. He found himself on August 27, 1665, in London during the outbreak of the Great Plague of London. The rest of the novel is devoted to his efforts to repair the Time Machine and leave this time period before getting infected with the disease. He also has an encounter with Robert Hooke. He eventually dies of the disease on September 20, 1665. The story gives a list of subsequent owners of the manuscript until 1976. It also gives the name of the Time Traveller as Robert James Pensley, born to James and Martha Pensley in 1850 and disappearing without trace on June 18, 1894.
•   Morlock Night by K.W. Jeter, first published in 1979. A steampunk novel in which the Morlocks, having studied the Traveller's machine, duplicate it and invade Victorian London.
•   The Space Machine by Christopher Priest, first published in 1976. Because of the movement of planets, stars and galaxies, for a time machine to stay in one spot on Earth as it travels through time, it must also follow the Earth's trajectory through space. In Priest's book, the hero damages the Time Machine, and arrives on Mars, just before the start of the invasion described in The War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells himself appears as a minor character.
•   Time Machine II by George Pal and Joe Morhaim, published in 1981. The Time Traveller, named George, and the pregnant Weena try to return to his time, but instead land in the London Blitz, dying during a bombing raid. Their newborn son is rescued by an American ambulance driver, and grows up in the United States under the name Christopher Jones. Sought out by the lookalike son of James Filby, Jones goes to England to collect his inheritance, leading ultimately to George's journals, and the Time Machine's original plans. He builds his own machine with 1970s upgrades, and seeks his parents in the future.
•   The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter, first published in 1995. This sequel was officially authorized by the Wells estate to mark the centenary of the original's publication. In its wide-ranging narrative, the Traveller's desire to return and rescue Weena is thwarted by the fact that he has changed history (by telling his tale to his friends, one of whom published the account). With a Morlock (in the new history, the Morlocks are intelligent and cultured) he travels through the multiverse as increasingly complicated timelines unravel around him, eventually meeting mankind's far future descendants, whose ambition is to travel into the multiverse of multiverses. Like much of Baxter's work, this is definitely hard science fiction; it also includes many nods to the prehistory of Wells's story in the names of characters and chapters.
•   The 2003 short story "On the Surface" by Robert J. Sawyer begins with this quote from the Wells original: "I have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it [the time machine] to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose." In the Sawyer story, the Morlocks develop a fleet of time machines and use them to conquer the same far future Wells depicted at the end of the original, by which time, because the sun has grown red and dim and thus no longer blinds them, they can reclaim the surface of the world.
•   The Man Who Loved Morlocks and The Trouble With Weena are two different sequels, the former a novel and the latter a short story, by David J. Lake. Each of them concerns the Time Traveller's return to the future. In the former, he discovers that he cannot enter any period in time he has already visited, forcing him to travel in to the further future, where he finds love with a woman whose race evolved from Morlock stock. In the latter, he is accompanied by Wells, and succeeds in rescuing Weena and bringing her back to the 1890s, where her political ideas cause a peaceful revolution.
•   In Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series, the Time Traveller is a very minor character, his role consists of being shocked by the decadence of the inhabitants of the End of Time. H.G. Wells also appears briefly in this series when the characters visit Bromley in 1896.
•   The Time Traveller makes a brief appearance in Allan and the Sundered Veil, a back-up story appearing in the first volume of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he saves Allan Quatermain, John Carter and Randolph Carter from a horde of Morlocks.
•   The time-traveling hero known as "The Rook" (who appeared in various comics from Warren Publishing) is the grandson of the original Time Traveller. In one story, he met the Time Traveller, and helps him stop the Morlocks from wiping out the Eloi.
•   Philip José Farmer speculated that the Time Traveller was a member of the Wold Newton family. He is said to have been the great-uncle of Doc Savage.
•   In the movie Gremlins, the Time Traveller's machine (the one from the 1960 movie) is briefly glimpsed at an inventor's convention. While a character has a phone conversation in the foreground, the time machine disappears in the background.
•   Burt Libe wrote two sequels: Beyond the Time Machine and Tangles in Time, telling of the Time Traveller finally settling down with Weena in the 33rd century. They have a few children, the youngest of whom is the main character in the second book.
•   In 2006, Monsterwax Trading Cards combined The Time Machine with two of Wells' other stories, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The War of the Worlds. The resulting 102 card trilogy, by Ricardo Garijo , was entitled The Art of H. G. Wells. [1] The continuing narrative links all three stories by way of an unnamed writer mentioned in Wells' first story, to the nephew of Ed Prendick (the narrator of Dr. Moreau), and another unnamed writer (narrator) in The War of the Worlds.
Just to entangle reality and fiction further, H. G. Wells also appears as a character, aboard his own time machine, in the 1979 film Time After Time and the 1990s television series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. He also briefly travels in time with the Doctor in the Doctor Who serial Timelash, the events of which are said to inspire him to write The Time Machine. In Ronald Wright's novel A Scientific Romance, a lonely museum curator on the eve of the millennium discovers a letter written by Wells shortly before his death, foretelling the imminent return of the Time Machine. The curator finds the machine, then uses it to travel into a post-apocalyptic future.