H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and the End of Literature

As a writer of fiction, polemic and popular science a generation after Darwin, H. G. Wells sought to place the aesthetic at the service of evolutionary imperatives. Like many of his Victorian contemporaries in the decades following the publication of the Origin of Species and the 1870-71 Education Acts, Wells worried over the place of imaginative literature in mankind's evolutionary future. He feared in particular that the pursuit of aesthetic perfection for its own sake would risk not only literature's extinction, but also humanity's. The Time Machine dramatises the biological and cultural consequences of mankind's neglect of its own future survival, and the consequent extinction of artistic culture in this imagined degeneration.