Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the sixth chapter of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

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Welcome to Bite At A Time Books, where we read you your favorite classics one Byte at a Time.

My name is Brie Carlyle and I love to read and wanted to share my passion with listeners like you.

If you enjoy our show, be sure to follow us so you get and all the new episodes.

If you want to see exclusive behind the scenes of our show, join our Patreon.

We would also love for you to drop us a rating on your favorite podcast platform and share our show with your friends.

You can catch us on all the social medias at Byte At A Time Books.

We are now part of the Bite At A Time Books Productions Network.

If you ever wondered what inspired your favorite classic novelist to write their stories, what was happening in their lives or the world at the time, check out Bite At A Time Books Behind the Story.

Wherever you listen to podcasts today, we'll be continuing the Time Machine by H.

G.

Wells six The Sunset of Mankind A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest.

They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children, they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy.

The dinner and my conversational beginnings ended.

I noted for the first time that almost all those who had surrounded me at first were gone.

It is odd, too, how speedily I came to disregard these little people.

I went out through the portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied.

I was continually meeting more of these men of the future who would follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and having smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.

The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the Great Hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun.

At first things were very confusing.

Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known.

Even the flowers.

The big building I had left was situated on the slope of a broad River Valley, but the themes had shifted perhaps a mile from its present position.

I resolved to Mount to the summit of a crest, perhaps a mile and a half away from which I could get a wider view of this our planet in the year 802,701 Ad.

For that, I should explain, was the date the little dials of my machine recorded as I walked.

I was watching for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendor in which I found the world for ruinous.

It was a little way up the Hill, for instance, with a great heap of granite bound together by masses of aluminum, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls, and crumbled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagodolike plants, Nettles, possibly, but wonderfully tinted with Brown about the leaves and incapable of stinging.

It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure.

To what end?

Built, I could not determine.

It was here that I was destined at a later date to have a very strange experience, the first intimation of a still stranger discovery.

But of that I will speak in its proper place.

Looking round with a sudden thought from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realized that there were no small houses to be seen.

Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished.

Here and there among the greenery were palacelike buildings, but the house and the cottage, which formed such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared.

Communism, said I to myself, and on the heels of that came another thought.

I looked at the halfdozen little figures that were following me.

Then, in a flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb.

It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before, but everything was so strange now.

I saw the fact plainly enough in costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now Mark off the sexes from each other.

These people of the future were alike, and the children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents.

I judged then that the children at that time were extremely precocious, physically at least, and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.

Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was, after all, what one would expect for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman.

The institution of the family and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force.

Where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the state.

Where violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity.

Indeed, there is no necessity for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children's needs, disappears.

We see some beginnings of this, even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete.

This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the time.

Later I was to appreciate how far it fell short of the reality.

While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola.

I thought in a transitory way of the oddness of Wells still existing, and then resumed the threat of my speculation.

There were no large buildings towards the top of the Hill, and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time, with a strange sense of freedom and adventure.

I pushed on up to the crest.

There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize, corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and halfsmothered in soft Moss.

The arm rusts cast and filed into the resemblance of Griffin's heads.

I sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day.

It was as sweet and fair of you as I have ever seen.

The sun had already gone below the horizon, and the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple and Crimson.

Below was the Valley of the Fames, in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel.

I've already spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied.

Here and there rooted a white or silvery figure in the waste garden of the Earth.

Here and there came the sharp vertical line of some Cupula or obelisk.

There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidence of agriculture.

The whole Earth had become a garden.

So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was something in this way.

Afterwards, I found I had got only half truth, or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth.

It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity, upon the wane.

The Ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind.

For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged.

And yet come to think it is a logical consequence.

Enough strength is the outcome of need.

Security sets a premium on feebleness.

The work of ameliorating.

The conditions of life, the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure had gone steadily onto a climax.

One triumph of a United humanity over nature had followed another.

Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward.

And the harvest was what I saw.

After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage.

The science of our time has attacked but a little Department of the field of human disease.

But even so it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently.

Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can.

We improve our favorite plants and animals and how few they are gradually by selective breeding, now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle.

We improve them gradually because our ideals are vague and tentative and our knowledge is very limited because nature, too is shy and slow in our clumsy hands.

Someday all this will be better organized and still better.

That is, the drift of the current.

In spite of the eddies, the whole world will be intelligent, educated and cooperating.

Things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of nature.

In the end, wisely and carefully, we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.

This adjustment, I say, must have been done and done.

Well done indeed.

For all time in the space of time across which my machine had left, the air was free from Nats, the Earth from weeds or fungi.

Everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers.

Brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither.

The ideal of preventative medicine was attained.

Diseases had been stamped out.

I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay.

And I shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrification and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes.

Social triumphs, too, had been affected.

I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed.

And as yet I had found them engaged in no toil.

There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle.

The shop, the Advertisement traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world was gone.

It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise.

The difficulty of increasing population had been met, I guessed, and population had ceased to increase.

But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the change.

What, unless biological science is a massive errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigor.

Hardship and freedom.

Conditions under which the active, strong and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall.

Conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self restraint, patience and decision.

And the institution of the family.

And the emotions that arise therein.

The fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self devotion all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.

Now, where are these imminent dangers?

There is a sentiment arising and it will grow against canobial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts.

Unnecessary things now and things that make us uncomfortable.

Savage survivals, discords in a refined and pleasant life.

I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence in those big, abundant ruins.

And it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of nature.

For after the battle comes quiet.

Humanity had been strong, energetic and intelligent.

And had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived.

And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security.

That restless energy that with us his strength would become weakness.

Even in our own time.

Certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure.

Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help may even be hindrances to a civilized man.

And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, Would be out of place.

For countless years, I judge, there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of Constitution, no need of toil for such a life.

What we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong are indeed no longer weak.

Better equipped, indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet.

No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw Was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived.

The flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace this has ever been.

The fate of energy and security it takes to art into eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.

Even this artistic impetus would at last die away, had almost died in the time I saw.

To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight.

So much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more.

Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity.

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.

And it seemed to me that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last.

As I stood there in the gathering dark, I thought that in this simple explanation, I had mastered the problem of the world, Mastered the whole secret of these delicious people.

Possibly the checks they had devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well, and their numbers had rather diminished Than kept stationary.

That would account for the abandoned ruins.

Very simple was my explanation.

And plausible enough, as most wrong theories are.

Thank you for joining Byte at a Time Books today while we read a Byte of one of your favorite classics.

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You can catch us on all the social medias at bite at a Time Books.

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We are now part of the Bite at a Time Books Productions network.

If you ever wondered what inspired your favorite classic novelist to write their stories, what was happening in their lives or the world at the time, check out bite at the Time books.

Behind the story Tuesdays wherever you listen to podcasts again.