The Time Machine

In 1933, Wells wrote an introduction to a collection of his writings called The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells, in which he elaborated a principle that he said he followed when writing The Time Machine. The principle has since come to be called Wells’s Law. Wells believed that a work of speculative fiction should contain no more than one extraordinary concept—such as time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, human-animal hybrids—couched in an otherwise normal human world. The author’s task is to extrapolate the implications for the real world (and for a fictional protagonist) of this one impossible thing. Thus, in The Time Machine, the single remarkable thing is the machine itself, and everything else in the story is speculation on what such a machine might reveal.

Wells explains: “‘How would you feel and what might not happen to you,’ is the typical question, if for instance pigs could fly and one came rocketing over a hedge at you […] But no one would think twice about the answer if hedges and houses also began to fly” (Wells, H. G. The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells. V. Gollancz Ltd., 1935, viii.) Too much impossibility at once makes readers give up in frustration; they withdraw their willing suspension of disbelief, and the story fails. A single remarkable thing, on the other hand, permits the human mind to speculate, grounded in the organizing principle of a single variable such as a time machine.

Wells’s The Time Machine reveals a world hundreds of thousands of years in the future, which permits the author to speculate on the ways in which people might evolve. Thus, the possibilities of a single invention, a time machine, open the door to interesting hypotheses on human evolution. Were Wells to add yet another such remarkable device into the story, the possibilities might multiply uncontrollably, and the story would collapse.

Wells followed his “law” in several novels that take place in the present, so that society and culture remain unchanged, save for a single variable—a time machine, an invisibility chemical, a visit from aliens.

Since Wells first proposed it, writers have honored and abused it in countless ways. One legitimate violation of the rule occurs in futuristic sci-fi, in which the societies described possess numerous remarkable technologies. Similarly, works of fantasy contain entire worlds of creatures and powers described in detail. Both story types effectively reverse Wells’s Law, in that they describe worlds unlikely in dozens of ways, then place within those worlds protagonists who must pursue a single quest—to save that world, escape from it, triumph within it, and so forth.