But when the High King is stricken with madness and a mysterious plague, Britain is set to be thrown into the chaos of yesteryear. Tory aspires to seek the advice of an advanced civilisation that thrived long before recorded history, where men of great learning and miracles were abundant.

The women of Otherworld agree to aid Tory to make her passage back through time. But once in Atlantis, Tory must use her own devices to find the cure she seeks and a way to return to her loved ones in the Dark Ages.

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The book mixes science fiction tropes with theatrical structure, combining existential themes with noir-style dialogue. Leiber fills the pages with paradoxes, personality clashes, and philosophical musings, forcing characters to confront not just the enemy but their own fractured selves. The constrained setting sharpens the tension, while the broader implications of the Change War ripple outward, giving the novella both intimacy and scale. The Big Time is as much about human nature as it is about speculative warfare.

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But across the vortex of time and space, she is being watched. The Merlin knows of the legend Tory is to become, and through the wisdom of the Old Ones, he teleports her back to the Dark Age.

Prince Maelgwn of Gwynedd and his band of knights stumble across this mysterious woman dressed in jeans and leather jacket. Believing she is the witch of the stones, they threaten to kill her. Rising to her own defense, Tory challenges the Prince’s champion to unarmed combat.

With her superior fighting skill she easily overwhelms the warrior, winning the admiration of the Prince, and changing the course of British history forever.

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Utilizing a frame story set in then-present Victorian England, Wells’ text focuses on a recount of the otherwise anonymous Time Traveller’s journey into the far future. A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells’ era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively. It is believed that Wells’ depiction of the Eloi as a race living in plenitude and abandon was inspired by the utopic romance novel News from Nowhere (1890), though Wells’ universe in the novel is notably more savage and brutal.

In his 1931 preface to the book, Wells wrote that The Time Machine seemed “a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks over it once more”, though he states that “the writer feels no remorse for this youthful effort”. However, critics have praised the novella’s handling of its thematic concerns, with Marina Warner writing that the book was the most significant contribution to understanding fragments of desire[clarify] before Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, with the novel “[conveying] how close he felt to the melancholy seeker after a door that he once opened on to a luminous vision and could never find again”.

The Time Machine has been adapted into two feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions and many comic book adaptations. It has also indirectly inspired many more works of fiction in many media productions.

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