Vincent Trapinaud
In The Time Machine (1895), H. G. Wells imagines the humanity of the year 802,701 split into two species: the Eloi, graceful and carefree, who live on the surface in an abundance they do not produce, and the Morlocks, underground, who tend the machines, feed them, clothe them, and eat them at night. It is usually read as a satire of class struggle. Book I of Les Fermiers (The Farmers), a trilogy currently published in French, reads it, as an openly stated hypothesis, as the description of livestock farming: a happy herd that doesn’t know it is being farmed.
The Time Machine: a summary of the novel
The novel came out in London in 1895, published by Heinemann. Wells was twenty-eight. He had studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s great defender. It was his first major success, and one of the founding texts of science fiction. Here is what it tells, without adding anything.
A story told at the dinner table
The hero has no name: he is the Time Traveller. One evening, in his house in Richmond, he explains to his guests (a doctor, a psychologist, a provincial mayor, the narrator) that time is a fourth dimension through which one might move. He shows them a model, which vanishes before their eyes. No one really believes him.
The following week, he arrives late for dinner, dirty, limping, starving, and tells his story. This detail matters: what we know of the Eloi and the Morlocks comes from a single witness, who corrects his hypotheses as the story goes on.
The year 802,701
The machine stops in a hailstorm, in a garden. Before the Traveller rises a white stone Sphinx set on a bronze pedestal. The landscape looks like an endless park: flowers, fruit trees, vast ruined buildings, no individual houses.
Small beings about four feet tall arrive, dressed in tunics, with delicate, gentle faces. These are the Eloi. They surround him without fear, touch his clothes, laugh, offer him flowers. They speak a musical language, but tire of everything after a few minutes, like children. They live together in great halls, eat only fruit, and seem neither to work, nor read, nor make anything.
The stolen machine
That same evening, the Traveller discovers that his machine has disappeared. Tracks show it has been dragged inside the Sphinx’s pedestal, whose bronze panels remain stubbornly shut. When he questions the Eloi, they change the subject. He is a prisoner of the year 802,701.
He then notices several things. The Eloi are afraid of the dark: at nightfall they no longer go out and sleep huddled together. The landscape is dotted with a kind of well, topped with small towers, from which rise a dull sound of machinery and a draft of air. And one night, he glimpses white, apelike figures fleeing the light.
Weena, the Morlocks and the forest
One day, a little Eloi woman is drowning in the river in front of her fellows, who do not move. The Traveller saves her. Her name is Weena, and she never leaves him again: she follows him, brings him flowers, cries when he goes away. It is the only bond of affection in the novel.
The Traveller climbs down one of the wells. There he finds the Morlocks: pale beings with large red eyes made for darkness, who live among the machines. On a table he sees meat. Little by little he understands where it comes from.
With Weena, he reaches the Palace of Green Porcelain, a former museum where books and machines are crumbling to dust. There he finds matches and an iron lever. On the way back, in a forest, the Morlocks attack them in complete darkness. A fire breaks out. In the confusion, Weena disappears.
The end of the world, then the return
The next day, the doors of the pedestal are open: it is a trap. He rushes in, climbs back onto his machine and flees forward, to a twilight Earth under a huge red sun, millions of years later. Then he returns to his own time, just in time for dinner.
His guests do not believe him. His only proof is two strange white flowers in his pocket that Weena had slipped there. The next day, he sets off again with a camera. When the book ends, the narrator has been waiting for him for three years. All that remains of him are those two flowers, which, the narrator says, bear witness that in the human heart, even when intelligence and strength have gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still live on.
Who are the Eloi and the Morlocks?
They are two human species from the same stock, separated by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. The Traveller does not understand this all at once. Over the course of the story he proposes three successive explanations, and much of the novel lies in these corrections.
First hypothesis: the twilight of humanity. The Traveller first believes in a humanity that has conquered disease, hunger and danger, and that nothing challenges anymore. He draws from this an idea that runs through the book: intelligence answers change and danger; where there is no more need, it fades.
Second hypothesis: the separation of classes. The discovery of the Morlocks forces him to revise. He imagines that the gap between the owners and the workers of his time has widened all the way. The rich kept the surface, the sun, the gardens for themselves. The workers were relegated to underground factories, until they adapted to them physically. The Eloi would descend from the idle aristocracy, the Morlocks from the proletariat.
Third hypothesis: livestock. The meat on the Morlocks’ table overturns everything. The old hierarchy has been inverted. The descendants of the masters are now only fattened cattle, which the Morlocks maintain, feed and clothe, and whose breeding they probably oversee. The Eloi’s fear of the dark is not a whim: it is the memory, turned instinct, of what happens on moonless nights.
The Traveller himself admits that his explanation may be wrong: a few days on the spot, with no guide and no real conversation with the Eloi, who refuse to speak of the Morlocks. This uncertainty should be kept in mind before any rereading.
What do the Morlocks mean? The classic readings
For more than a century, two major readings have dominated. They are grounded in the text, and you need to know them before proposing a third.
A social allegory of class struggle
This is the most widely taught reading, and the Traveller states it himself. Wells, a socialist, was writing in the industrial England of the mines and the London Underground, where workers barely saw daylight. His future pushes to the limit the separation between those who toil below ground and those who enjoy life on the surface. Wells’s social allegory is a warning: a society that divides human beings this way ends up producing two species.
A fable of degeneration
The second reading is biological. As Huxley’s student, Wells knew Darwinism from the inside, and he knew that evolution is not guaranteed progress. In his day, biologists such as Ray Lankester were discussing the idea of degeneration: a species placed in an environment that is too easy can lose faculties that have become useless. The Eloi illustrate it. They are not punished: they are adapted, perfectly, to a life in which there is nothing left to understand. Their beauty and their weakness are two sides of the same absence of effort.
Both readings are right. But they dwell little on what the novel’s third hypothesis describes: livestock farming, with farmers.
A happy herd: the rereading in book I of the Farmers
Book I of Les Fermiers devotes part of its chapter “From Plato to Wells: truth encoded in fiction” to Wells. It does not dispute the social reading; it finds it incomplete. And it starts from a simple question.
If the Morlocks hate the Eloi, why do they keep them so comfortably? Why not exterminate them? The novel answers: because they feed on them. Book I draws the consequence. A species that destroyed its resource would disappear with it. The relationship is therefore not a war but husbandry, and husbandry has its own logic: keep the herd healthy, calm, docile, and above all unaware of its condition.
Reread the Eloi with these three lines in mind. Fruit in abundance, clothes they do not weave, no hunger, no work, no worry about tomorrow. Their only dread is the night, and they never think about it: they avoid it. They are not chained slaves. They are satisfied beings.
This is where the novel meets the sentence that opens book I, and that sums up its whole map:
“They don’t know they are being farmed.” The Eloi are the clearest image of this sentence in all of literature. In 1895, Wells built an entire people whose happiness is the very form of their captivity. Book I draws an even harder formula from it: the Farmers need no physical chains; it is enough that the herd can no longer imagine it is a herd.
The Eloi are not stupid by nature: their ancestors built the civilization whose ruins they inhabit. Their inability to conceive of their situation is the product of their condition, generation after generation. In this reading, ignorance is not an accident of the system; it is its most carefully made product.
Comfort as a fence
Wells’s most unsettling lesson is not the horror of the Morlocks. It is the sweetness of the Eloi’s life. Everything in their world is pleasant, and that is precisely what holds them. No wall surrounds their park. No one stops them from leaving. They simply have no reason to.
Book II, Le Troisième Miel (The Third Honey), gives this mechanism its name in the Farmers’ map. It distinguishes two ordinary Honeys: Ba-Honey, produced by fear, anger and pain, and Hab-Honey, produced by joy, connection, gratitude and pleasure. It is tempting to imagine that the second is the way out of the farm. The book argues the opposite, and that is the whole subject of its chapter on Hab-Honey, “the sweetest trap”.
The Eloi are a people of the carrot. They know the stick only at night, and they have learned not to think about it. Their day is a string of small pleasures: flowers, games, swims, fruit. None of this is bad. Book II insists on it: joy is not the problem, and it is not about eyeing your happiness with an accountant’s suspicion. The problem, it says, is the structure of that joy: it always comes from outside, it depends on conditions, it goes out when the condition disappears. A joy that hangs on what you are given ties you to the one who gives.
Book I makes the same link with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Huxley being the grandson of Wells’s teacher: no more visible Morlocks, only comfort, distraction and soma. It sees in it a farm optimized for industrial Hab-Honey, mass-produced, without peaks but without interruption.
There is nothing esoteric about this point. A fence you can feel, you contest. A fence shaped like comfort, you defend. The Eloi would not defend the Morlocks, but they would defend their gardens without hesitation.
What Wells does not say, and what the Farmers add
We must be honest about the boundary. Wells speaks neither of emotional energy, nor of non-physical layers, nor of invisible entities. His Morlocks are creatures of flesh who eat flesh. Nothing in the novel suggests he meant to write anything other than scientific and social fiction. Book I acknowledges it: Wells was a rationalist, an atheist, and belonged to no known esoteric circle.
What the Farmers add is a reading hypothesis, and it comes down to three shifts.
- Shift the resource. In Wells, the Morlocks consume bodies. In the Farmers’ map, inspired by Robert Monroe’s accounts of the Loosh, what would be harvested is not flesh but the emotional energy the living produce: Ba-Honey and Hab-Honey. The Eloi are no longer eaten; what they feel is harvested.
- Shift the farmers. In Wells, they live underground. In the Farmers’ hypothesis, they would stand in a layer of reality our senses do not perceive, organized in a hierarchy that book I describes: the Field Harvesters, the Traders, the Architects. The same structure appears, according to the book, among the Gnostics, where the Archons keep the soul in forgetfulness.
- Shift the night. In Wells, the harvest takes place in the dark, while the Eloi sleep. In the Farmers’ rereading, the darkness is that of unconsciousness: you would only harvest well what doesn’t know it is being harvested.
With these three shifts, the novel becomes, for book I, an encoding: Wells would have sensed, intuitively, a map that he transposed into the future and into matter. The book puts forward several explanations without deciding between them. None is proven, and it does not claim otherwise.
One thing must be said clearly: this reading points at no one. In the Farmers’ map, there are no human Morlocks to unmask and no group to accuse. Book I insists: the harvesting machine needs no conspiracy.
Leaving the Eloi condition: seeing, not fighting
If the Eloi are being farmed, the temptation is immediate: grab the iron lever and strike. That is what the Traveller does, and the novel shows, without comment, what it produces: the fire ravages the forest, Weena disappears, he flees. Nothing has changed for the Eloi.
From this dead end, book I draws a rule that holds for the whole Farmers’ map: anger at the farmer is still Ba-Honey, the most harvested Honey of all.
What the Eloi lack is not strength, it is sight. In a way they know, since they are afraid, but they do not want to know that they know. Leaving the Eloi condition therefore starts there: looking at what the sweetness covers, without throwing yourself into terror or revolt. Book I calls this calm lucidity: seeing the mechanism and, without anger, ceasing to feed it.
In practice, this sight requires no power. It is practiced on yourself, in modest gestures:
- Notice where your joy comes from. Not to suspect it, but to see whether it depends entirely on what you are offered: a notification, a reward, content calibrated to please you. Book II does not ask you to give up joy; it asks you to see its structure.
- Name the night instead of avoiding it. The Eloi never speak of the Morlocks. What you refuse to name keeps acting in the shadows. Looking a fear in the face, without feeding it, already loosens part of its grip.
- Refuse the lever’s answer. When discovering a mechanism fills you with rage, notice that this rage is exactly what the mechanism produces best.
- Keep the two flowers. The novel does not end on the Morlocks but on Weena’s tenderness. Lucidity is not disenchantment: it leaves gratitude intact, as long as gratitude no longer serves as a fence.
In the Farmers’ map, this quality of presence produces a third energy, neither Ba-Honey nor Hab-Honey, which book II calls the Third Honey. It is not a weapon against the farmers. It is what an emotion becomes when it is seen instead of endured.
Why reread Wells today?
Because the line between Eloi and Morlocks no longer runs between two species. Our lives mix both: we work, and we also consume an unbroken stream of small pleasures designed to hold us. On some days, anyone can recognize a little of the Eloi in themselves.
The parallel with Plato’s allegory of the cave sheds light on this. Plato’s prisoners do not suffer from their chains; neither do the Eloi. In both stories, the strongest captivity is the one you do not feel. Book I sees in them a single map, redrawn in each age with its own tools.
Perhaps Wells meant none of this. But he painted a happy, well-fed people, without walls, who don’t know they are being farmed. To place this rereading within the whole, you can explore the Farmers’ universe, meditate on card 19, A Blindness, or read book I of Les Fermiers (in French). You don’t have to believe it. It is enough, like the Traveller, to watch what happens when night falls.
