I'm re-reading HG Wells' The Time Machine, which I haven't read in a very long time. As far as I know, it was actually the first science fiction novel (or novelette) that I ever read as a kid. And it was also the first modern work of science fiction in the genre. Older works exist, but they feels too old to be called modern.
And I'm noticing things much more clearly now than before. Most of all Wells' ideas about eugenics and degeneration of humans. It doesn't really bother me, since it was partly a product of his time, and partly a good foundation and inspiration for a concept that has been used countless times since.
His ideas about the combination of human evolution, nature versus nurture, natural selection (or the absence of it) and society, are seen in several others of his most famous works.
Wells and others had evolution partly wrong back then. They believed it was all about competing and survival, but scientists like Lynn Margulis have since shown that cooperation and symbiosis are just as important elements in the web of life.
There is one sentence I wish had been left out:
Quote:
I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up the sky. I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened me. I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind—a strange animal in an unknown world. I must have raved to and fro, screaming and crying upon God and Fate. I have a memory of horrible fatigue, as the long night of despair wore away; of looking in this impossible place and that; of groping among moonlit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows; at last, of lying on the ground near the sphinx and weeping with absolute wretchedness, even anger at the folly of leaving the machine having leaked away with my strength. I had nothing left but misery. Then I slept, and when I woke again it was full day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on the turf within reach of my arm.
This is the only reference to birds in the story so far, and if he hadn't mentioned the two birds, that would open up for the possible scenario that a huge disaster had happened in the past that made humans perhaps the only surviving terrestrial tetrapod. Not that it would change the story much, but it would make your mind wanter, and perhaps also inspire more fanfiction.