SOURCE: Hollinger, Veronica. “Deconstructing The Time Machine.¹” Science Fiction Studies 14, no. 42 (July 1987): 201-21.

In the following essay, Hollinger explores aspects of time travel in literature, contending that The Time Machine achieves an ironic deconstruction of Victorian scientific positivism.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination. …

—Samuel Johnson

The idea of time travel has for many years exercised the ingenuity not only of SF writers, but of scientists and philosophers as well; neither the equations of quantum physics nor the rules of logic have managed definitively to prove or to disprove the possibility that this most paradoxical of SF concepts may some day be realized.² The purpose of this present essay is to examine some aspects of time travel within the framework of Derridean deconstruction, since, as I hope to demonstrate, the time-travel story always achieves a deconstruction of certain received ideas about the...