Like
Robert Silverberg I too was introduced to science fiction when I read
H.G. Wells' The Time Machine
at the age of ten. I have a beautiful edition of this work,
published in 1923 by Random House, which contains a fascinating
preface by Wells, explaining the background and genesis of this
ground-breaking story. It also contains a number of unusual
designs and illustrations by W.A. Dwiggins, two of which are shown
below, and which put meat on the bones of the story.
Great lidless pinkish-grey
eyes
More than thirty million years
hence
One of the most evocative and frightening of all passages in
science fiction comes from this story as the End of Days
approaches for the Earth and for Humankind:
So I travelled, stopping ever and again,
in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery
of the earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow
larger and duller in the western sky, and the life of the old earth
ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge
red hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth of the
darkling heavens. A horror of this great
darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the
pain I felt in breathing overcame me. I shivered and a deadly
nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the
edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I
felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I
stood, sick and confused, I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal -
there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing - against the red
water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football
perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from
it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and
it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a
terrible dread of living helpless in that remote and awful twilight
sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.