TIME MACHINE; ED. BY PATRICK PARRINDER.

After a couple of duff book choices recently, I plumped for classic sci-fi next and a book I probably should have read twenty-five years ago. H G Wells' The Time Machine was one of the first pairing in this year's SYNC audio giveaway (www.audiobooksync.com). Not only free but also narrated by National Treasure Derek Jacobi - what more does a girl need! I believe The Time Machine was the first time travelling novel and, for a book written almost 120 years ago, it is surprisingly accessible in both its themes and its language. Perhaps the recent emergence of steampunk has attuned me to the style because I could vividly imagine every scene as it was being described to me. Jacobi does a fantastic job of the narration bringing everything from the dining table to the Morlocks alive. I find that I prefer old books on audio because I tend to read 'too fast' thereby sometimes missing out on detail. With audio, the book is revealed at the narrator's pace so is particularly rewarding for richly described stories such as this one. The Time Machine has dated but mostly nicely so. I loved that the artefacts most prized by the Time Traveller were matches, and pink hued clouds had nothing to do with data storage. There is, of course, rampant misogyny and plenty of that particularly English patronising of anyone from Elsewhere. Also I have no idea if any of the science is valid and I don't intend to find out. The magic of the story is enough in its own right and I'm glad I've finally caught up with the rest of the world in discovering H G Wells.

Like most of Wells' books, this hasn't aged well. Other than travelling forwards in time once - which is pretty much all the Time Machine does (the other trips are so fleeting as to be largely forgettable) - there isn't a great deal going on. There don't seem to be any female characters with agency, and the only one we really hear anything about spends the entire time clinging to a male character. Yes it's a product of its time, but that doesn't make it any less jarring. The end is unsatisfying - what happens to the Time Traveller?

Worth reading once to get a feel for how science fiction used to be, and how far the genre has come. Not one I'll be returning to anytime soon, unless I want to try it in another language (the low page count and less advanced vocabulary make it a reasonable choice for that).