[extropy-chat] Putting another Eloi on the barbie

[Damien Broderick]

At 05:45 PM 12/14/2005 -0800, the Jeffster wrote:

><The Eloi descended from
>effete aristocrats, the Morlocks from the degenerated
>and brutalised working class.>
>
>Is this actually derived from Wells' text

Soitenly. See e.g.
www.thenation.com/doc/20020401/klawans

"As is well-known to anyone with a decent respect for Fabianism, H.G. Wells 
used The Time Machine to project into the future his ideas about 
nineteenth-century class struggle. His Eloi were the feeble descendants of 
aristocrats, lovely to look at but frivolous and idle. The Morlocks were 
the offspring of workers, condemned to dwell and labor brutishly 
underground. The twist in Wells's story was that the workers, by virtue of 
their know-how, had come to dominate the aristocrats. The twist in Wells's 
psychology was that this socialist, born into the very-lower middle class 
and self-educated out of penury, gave his sympathy to the Eloi and wrote of 
the Morlocks as subhuman." [etc]

Damien Broderick