I know everyone thinks it's science fiction. It's cited as an early entry in the genre. H.G. Wells, it is said, is the father of modern science fiction.
(I'd point more at Mary Shelley as the mother of the genre, but Wells certainly does fit the bill, through some of his other works.)
The thing is, though... This is barely a science fiction book. If anything, it's a class-conscious satire, a Utopian work in a the same genre as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but using a scientific framework based on then-current understandings of the world to hold it up and make its point.
The first thing you have to know about The Time Machine is that it's short. Really, really short. Wells himself was including it in his collections of short stories, positioning it as at most a novella, at least to him. The Penguin Classics edition is barely 140 pages, including the front matter and the notes in the back; the story itself doesn't even fill 100 of those. This makes it a fast read, but also means that it has to do what it's doing in a very short period.
There are essentially three 'main' characters in the book, though only the Time Traveller himself (no name provided) appears in every chapter. Alongside him, we have the Narrator, a Watson-like figure who is relating the story as it was told to him, along with his observations during the three chapters that form the frame narrative. Finally, for five chapters during the middle of the book, the Time Traveller has a companion in his wanderings through the future world in the form of Weena, a member of the childlike Eloi race that lives in the distant future. All other characters are either minor figures involved in the frame narrative, or decidedly homogenous members of one of the Eloi or Morlock races, and even Weena is only differentiated from the other Eloi in that she clings to the Time Traveller almost as if he's a safety blanket; while the Time Traveler makes it very clear that he is fond of her, it's equally clear that he doesn't see her as a romantic prospect, though he eventually has plans to bring her back to 1890s London with him.
The Time Traveller is the quintessential Victorian Scientist As Adventurer. He has come up with his contraption, built it himself, and (perhaps ill-advisedly) sends himself on a trip with it, simply to see if it all works, and to see the wonders of the future. His trip is poorly planned (the only supplies he brings with him are a box of matches), and he even admits himself, later, that he should've brought a camera and some walking shoes. There's a general lack of sense about some of the things that he does, as well, but key in most facets of the way he relates his adventure to the gathered guests at his house during the frame narrative is the way that everything he describes is simultaneously commented on; his mental state and understanding of the world around him is clear at every step of the way, and his observations constructed into a growing study of the nature of the Eloi and Morlock races. He notes himself that, was this like any of the other Utopian works that existed at the time, he would have been provided with a guide of some sort as to what the world was like, how all the aspects of the culture work together; while this is something that can be seen in many works of the sort, from Gulliver to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the lack here is both commentary on the absurdity of the literary device and on the dystopian nature of the world that is in place.
The bulk of the story is spent with the Time Traveller living among the Eloi. This is a race of stunted human-like beings, fragile and weak, living in a sort of pastoral simplicity, who seem to have little knowledge of how anything works beyond 'trees grow fruit' and 'darkness is scarybad'. Their language is simple as a result; the Time Traveller notes that it doesn't have much nuance beyond the basics of subject and verb, with most communication apparently done through gesture and facial expression. The initial assumption, based on the general lack of knowledge apparent among the Eloi, is that the lack of any kind of difficulty in their lives has resulted in a sort of negative evolution, where anything complicated has simply fallen by the wayside over the millennia, unneeded. Without challenge, there is no need for innovation, no need for creativity, no need for strength. And so humanity, in its journey toward becoming Eloi and returning, as it were, to the Garden of Eden, loses all the traits that lent themselves to overcoming challenges.
Of course, if that was the whole of the world of the future, we would have an awfully boring book. But there are two sides to every coin, and no such thing as a true utopia. Every utopia must bring with it a dystopia to prop it up, and in this case, that comes in the form of the other human-descended race on display, the Morlocks. These are sort of a ghostly outlier for the first part of the book, only visible in the distance or in flashes, appearing as sort of gray-white apparitions in the darkness. It's only later, after the Time Traveller starts venturing into places that the Eloi don't go in his quest for understanding, that they are fleshed out. The Morlocks are hunched, somewhat bestial creatures who live in the vast underground spaces, filled with machinery, that lie under the paradise on the surface. They have evolved similarly to the fish and insects that thrive in deep caverns, with a lack of pigmentation and incredible night vision, along with cat-like retinas to help them pick up even more of what little light reaches their subterranean homes. This means that they simply do not come out during the day, but also means that any bright light can serve as a deterrent, as even the tiny flame from a struck match is blinding to them. They are also carnivorous where the Eloi are frugivorous, and it's only after some thought that the Time Traveller realizes that the only possible source of the meat they consume is the Eloi.
The hypothesis that is put forward by the Time Traveller is that the Eloi and Morlocks are the end result of a literal stratification of the upper-classes and the workers; the Eloi are descended from the aristocracy who were more and more willing to push the workers into underground spaces where the workings of industry and society were out of sight for their paradise on Earth, while the proletariat, living and working alike in the spaces below, were effectively cut off from them, their only contact being the transfer of goods upward. Over time, this divided society developed into the simple creatures living above ground, and the hideous cannibals below. It's implied that the Morlocks have a significant understanding of machinery, in that they are able to keep all the devices below ground working, and appear to provide clothes to the Eloi; however, this seems to be in a similar manner to how livestock is cared for before the slaughter.
The underlying message, then, seems to be that the division of the classes is going to lead to the downfall of all; Wells even cites the decadence and genetic weakness that comes of aristocratic inbreeding as being evidence that the Eloi would be the natural endpoint of such behavior. It does not seem likely that Wells named the two races haphazardly; Eloi seems clearly derived from elohim, a Hebrew word which can alternately mean god, gods, or God, while Morlock seems similarly derived from Moloch, a bull-headed Canaanite god mentioned in the Bible in association with child sacrifice. This, then, suggests that Wells is intentionally inviting the view that the separation of the classes in such a manner is folly, doomed to lead to humanity's downfall.
The last part of the Time Traveller's adventure, after he has spent his time with the Eloi, details his venturing into the far future and witnessing the end of life on earth. That he encounters giant crabs at the far end of history perhaps makes sense with the way that invertebrates seem to like to evolve, though finding them on land seems unlikely, given that the Time Traveller himself finds that he is becoming rather winded by the low oxygen content of the air in that far time; however, this is nitpicking the science, and though some aspects of our understanding have obviously changed in the 125+ years since Wells wrote The Time Machine, he was basing everything on the science that was known at the time.
And, like I said before, this is not science fiction.
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