Social Commentary in "The Time Machine"

Science is my territory, but science fiction landscape of my dreams. The year 1995 was the hundredth anniversary of the publication of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, perhaps the darkest view of the human future ever imagined. Wells used a dramatic story to give his contemporaries a glimpse of a possible future. His purpose was not to predict but to warn. He was angry with the human species for its failures and follies. He was especially angry with the E nglish class system under which he had...

 Your Birth Star

Name any event in history and you will find a star out there whose light gives you a glimpse of something happening during the year of that event. Provided you are not a very young child, somewhere up in the night sky you can find your personal birth star. Its light is a thermonuclear glow that heralds the year of your birth. Indeed, you can find quite a few such stars (about 40 if you are 40; about 70 if you are 50; about 175 if you are 80 years old). When you look at one of your birth year ...

 Future Troubadour

The minister sighs abruptly. "You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated – it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside your head." Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieti...