"The Time Machine" - What 3 books did George take back to the future?

[catfishgal]

Last night's showing of the George Orwell classic got me thinking about which 3 books the hero George took back to rebuild the society humans and morlocks destroyed. What's your choice? As a movie and book lover, I thought this was a good topic for discussion.

[RainingViolets101]

I would take

1.) a book on carpentry how to build houses and structures

2.) a book on plumbing these people are still going to the well for water

3.) a book on how to make electricity...

[sineast]

Maybe an introduction to English literature. Perhaps there were too many Georges

flying around, but the book is by H.G. Wells, not George Orwell.

[fredbaetz]

Besides an introduction to English Literature, maybe one book for Weena titled "Hair styles of the 19th century." Any guesses what the 3rd book would be?

[sineast]

Difficult to think that any self-respecting Victorian, even one who dabbles in time-

traveling devices, wouldn't take along a copy of the Bible. Don't leave home without

it.

[Capuchin]

*Coup d'Etat -- A Guide to Taking Over a Nation* (Edward Luttwak, 1968)

 

*The Barbecue Building Book* (Sunset Books, 1971)

 

*How to Make Your Own Hammock & Lie In It* (Denison Andrews, 1973)

[hamradio]

[Hudson_Hawk]

> {quote:title=RainingViolets101 wrote:}{quote}

> I would take

> 1.) a book on carpentry how to build houses and structures

> 2.) a book on plumbing these people are still going to the well for water

> 3.) a book on how to make electricity...

 

You're on the right track. The George Wells portrayed in the film was a scientist and engineer -- an eminently practical man -- not a man of letters concerned with the spiritual salvation and cultural enrichment of the Eloi.

 

Wells would know all to well that the Bible and Shakespeare would not save someone from a raging infection, teach the equivalent of a child how to grow crops, or turn the earth into metal from which to, in Filby's words, "build a new world."

 

Limiting himself to only three books, I feel sure that Wells would choose one on medicine, one on mechanical engineering, and one on chemistry though, confined to one volume each, they'd all be of unfortunately limited scope. And there would be the total omissions of metallurgy and all the agricultural sciences.

 

Wells would probably reason that the Eloi, in their own good time, would create their own myths, legends, literature and poetry, and devise a religion (if any) meaningful to them. He'd believe that they didn't need one left over from a race whose insufferable piety not only couldn't prevent them from nearly exterminating themselves, but probably contributed to their own destruction. A race that bequeathed to Eloi and Morlocks, both, nearly a million years of physical and social bifurcation that led the former, for an eon, to being nothing more than fresh meat on the Morlocks' dinner tables, and the latter the ineradicable shame of devouring their own brothers.

[ShangriLa]

Hmmm....I always liked that thought-provoking question at the end of the movie. I guess he should take books on the 3 R's because the drone-like humans would've lost reading, writing and presumably mathematics due to millenia of enslavement--those 3 subjects are the fundamentals of "civilization".