One of those books that I've always meant to read, but never got around to. The quintessential time-travel story. Wells' narrator explains, in pretty clear language (considering the book was written in 1895) how time is just a fourth dimension; just as we move from left to right, backward and forward, up and down, we can move forward or reverse in time. But just as gravity limits our movement up and down, there are forces that make movement through time difficult. And the Time Traveler (our narrator's host) has discovered a way to push through those forces and, using his time machine, travel into the future. Moving over 800,000 years into the future, the Traveler encounters a carefree group of humanoid creatures called the Eloi, and their opposite number, the Morlocks. He determines that the Eloi are descended from the privileged classes, while the Morlocks are the descendants of the workers who were moved further and further underground to maintain the machines that provided for the Eloi.
A self-described socialist, Wells uses The Time Machine to comment on the disparity, already noticeable in Victorian England, between the quality of life of the leisure and working classes. He sees that conditions could gradually deteriorate to the point that workers are closed up below ground, working to ensure the comfortable lives of the rich. In the novel, he envisions the final outcome of that process - a childlike, ignorant leisure class unable to fend for themselves, and a feral, animal-like working class, driven by hunger to eating human flesh. (In fact, the Traveler believes that the Morlocks are raising the Eloi for food, as a rancher raises cattle.)
Along with Jules Verne, Wells is considered one of the fathers of the science fiction genre; he coined the term "time machine" himself, and this novel is considered to be one of the best early works in the genre.
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