H. G. Wells was twenty-eight when he published The Time Machine in 1895. It was his first novel. He had trained as a science teacher under Thomas Huxley and had spent years writing freelance science journalism while too ill to teach. The book invented an entire genre. The phrase time machine is his.
In a comfortable Richmond drawing-room, an unnamed inventor explains to his dinner guests that time is the fourth dimension and that, with the right machine, you can travel along it. He demonstrates a small model. The following Thursday he comes back, dirty and limping, and tells them what he has seen. Eight hundred thousand years in the future, the human race has split into two species. The Eloi — small, beautiful, vegetarian, helpless — live above ground in a ruined paradise. The Morlocks — pale, ape-like, blind — live in the machinery below, and they eat the Eloi.
The B1 adaptation collects the journey across twelve short chapters: the dinner-party demonstration, the arrival in the year 802,701, the meeting with Weena, the descent into the Morlocks' tunnels, the night fire in the forest, and the further journey into the dying earth at the end of time. Wells' English is plain, scientific, unornamented — the prose of a teacher explaining something carefully.
Wells wrote like the science teacher he had been: short sentences, concrete nouns, almost no rhetorical flourish. The Time Traveller's voice is observational and patient. He explains the world he has arrived in the way you would explain it to a class — what the buildings look like, what the people eat, what the machinery does. B1 readers will find that the science-fiction terminology is mostly invented from common roots (Eloi, Morlock) and the rest of the vocabulary is Victorian everyday English.
Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Time Machine was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B1. Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Time Machine is rated B1, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
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