I recently came across the following list on Amazon: “100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.”
As a fantasy writer myself, I decided to spend the next few years reading every book on this list and record the lessons I learned from each volume on how to be a great writer.
PLOT: “I’ve had a most amazing time….”
So begins the Time Traveler’s astonishing firsthand account of his journey 800,000 years beyond his own era—and the story that launched H.G. Wells’s successful career and earned him his reputation as the father of science fiction. With a speculative leap that still fires the imagination, Wells sends his brave explorer to face a future burdened with our greatest hopes…and our darkest fears. A pull of the Time Machine’s lever propels him to the age of a slowly dying Earth. There he discovers two bizarre races—the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks—who not only symbolize the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow as well. Published in 1895, this masterpiece of invention captivated readers on the threshold of a new century. Thanks to Wells’s expert storytelling and provocative insight, The Time Machine will continue to enthrall readers for generations to come. – goodreads.com
WHAT I LEARNED: H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is the shortest work on this list. I read the entire book early one morning at an Air BNB in Manhattan (the room was only slightly larger than the bed) just before Thrillerfest this past year.
There may be several reasons why Wells’s earliest masterpiece fits into such a slim volume. Most works of speculative fiction from the late 1800’s / early 1900’s were relatively short. The age of massive fantasy epics had not yet arrived. Also, Wells was still a relatively young man close to the beginning of his career. Whatever the reason, the story’s brevity acts in the work’s favor. The novella was something like a stepping stone for the reading public of the late nineteenth century, easing them into the time travel sub-genre.
The Time Machine isn’t the first example of a work of fiction in which a character travels through time. Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle is (technically) a time traveler and there are similar examples found in religious texts. However, The Time Machine is one of the first works (if not the first work) in which the central character controls a vehicle that moves them back and forth from one point in history to another.
Despite introducing such a revolutionary concept, the novel has a deceptively simple plot. The unnamed Time Traveler journeys forward to the year 802,701 and discovers that humans have evolved into the peaceful Eloi. The time machine vanishes and our hero has to battle the Morlocks in order to retrieve it. He then takes his machine further into the future where he witnesses the destruction of our world before finally returning home.
Compared to the Back to the Future trilogy, Terminator 2 and any Futurama episode involving time travel this is a fairly simple plot. The novella’s core concept opens a whole universe of possibilities, most of which go unused, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Had Wells given us a complex adventure full of paradoxes and scenes in which The Time Traveler meets himself or shoots his father before he was born, the story would have almost certainly been ignored in 1895. This is in part because people’s tastes in entertainment have changed, but also because the general public at the time was only just then being introduced to the concept of time travel. They needed a fairly straight-forward plot to ease them in.
Most aspiring authors think of their stories as revolutionary, unlike anything that had ever come before. However, it’s important to take a step back, look over your novel and judge just how fresh it is. (I try to avoid using the term “original” because there are no truly original plots.)
If you’re using familiar concepts such as dragons, zombies and schools that teach magic, then you need to complicate the story by bringing in elements that will reinvigorate the concept (I’ll be talking about this more in my entries on A Game of Thrones and The Mists of Avalon).
However, if you find that you are writing a novel with plot elements and characters who are drastically different from most works found in Barnes and Noble, you might need to take a deep breath and find a way to condense and simplify your story in order to make it more accessible to the reading public. I know this sounds like I’m telling you to dumb it down, but what I really mean is make sure that you’re not the only person in the world who can follow and appreciate the story.
Obviously, we all want to be known as authors who were “ahead of their time” but we don’t want centuries to pass before other people start appreciating our fiction.
DISTINCT PASSAGE: The Time Traveler describes the experience of hurtling into the future.
I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and even fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. And eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
