Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Recondite

Since I had read so much science-fiction as a kid, I felt pretty cocky when I added the H.G. Wells novella The Time Machine to my summer reading list. The very first sentence sent me to a dictionary to look up an unfamiliar word...

Anyway, the Time Traveller travels 800,000 years into the future and meets the eloi. These descendants of modern-day humans are all 4 feet tall and androgynous. The loss of sexual dimorphism in humans transformed this SF tale into a horror story for me ;-)
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Update (8/2) - In the recent movie adaptation, the eloi Weena is decidedly non-androgynous. This reinforces my view that movie adaptations of books should be considered on their own merits.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I typed in androgynous on Google images and got a picture of the female the protagonist gets with. I saw it and I was like omg is that from Time Machine!? I have never read the book but I saw the movie on VHS a very long time ago and since my VCR no longer works, even though I have been longing to see it again I haven't been able to. I can't believe I recognized her though...I don't remember any of the names or anything!
Very interesting that they were androgynous in the book though, I did not know that. I think the movie would have been more interesting if they kept that factor, though I do remember a lot of the men having long hair and having jewelry...maybe I am remembering wrong, but even so, you are right, they were not androgynous.

11:17 PM

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