The Time Machine by H.G. Wells Audiobook

The story begins with a group of men, including the narrator, listening to the Time Traveller discuss his theory that time is the fourth dimension. To demonstrate, the Time Traveller produces a miniature time machine and makes it disappear into thin air. The following week, the guests return to find their host looking disheveled and tired. After dinner, the Time Traveller begins his story.

The Time Traveller had completed his time machine and rocketed into the future, arriving in the year 802,701 AD. He finds himself in a paradisiacal world inhabited by small humanoid creatures called Eloi. They are frail and peaceful, offering him fruit to eat. However, when he returns to his time machine, he discovers it is missing. He suspects it has been hidden inside the pedestal of a nearby statue but cannot pry it open.

At night, he glimpses strange white ape-like creatures called Morlocks, who live below ground. He saves one of the Eloi, named Weena, from drowning, and she befriends him. The Time Traveller decides to venture into the Morlocks’ underground world to retrieve his time machine. He discovers that matches are an effective defense against the Morlocks, but they eventually chase him out.

Frightened, the Time Traveller takes Weena to the Palace of Green Porcelain, which turns out to be a museum. There, he finds more matches, camphor, and a lever to use as a weapon. That night, while retreating from the Morlocks through a giant wood, he accidentally starts a fire. Many Morlocks die in the fire and ensuing battle, but Weena is killed.

Exhausted, the Time Traveller returns to the pedestal and finds it pried open. He confidently strides in, and just as the Morlocks think they have trapped him, he springs onto the machine and whizzes into the future. He makes several more stops, including one on a beach where he is attacked by giant crabs. In a distant future, he sees a bloated red sun and a black blob with tentacles as the only sign of life. Eventually, he returns to the present time, exhausted.

The next day, the Time Traveller leaves again but never returns