{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"The Time Machine's Class War: Wells Underground","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6a28001ca917ce4c7065c483/c0590cf8-f175-4ccb-8c64-1d2c74ff0048.jpg?height=200","description":"H.G. Wells was the son of a lady's maid and a failed shopkeeper-cricketer, educated on a scholarship, a committed socialist whose views predated and exceeded his later, turbulent membership in the Fabian Society (which he joined in 1903, eight years after The Time Machine was published, and resigned in disgust around 1908). The Time Machine is his class war novel disguised as adventure fiction: travel 800,000 years into the future and find that capitalism has literally split humanity into two species — the beautiful, passive Eloi fed and clothed by the underground Morlocks, who have evolved to eat them. The surface/underground divide maps directly onto Victorian London's class geography. Wells wrote the novel during the founding years of the Independent Labour Party (1893–1895), at the peak of labor agitation. This episode examines how Wells used far-future speculation to make the present's class violence visible, and why his warning connects directly to today's billionaire bunkers and service economy.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}