Those robocalls were in Michigan (Detroit), right?
Bah! You’re right in that I was thinking Michigan, not Wisconsin, but it turns out the calls were across the Midwest, and Wohl and Burkman are currently facing charges in Ohio as well as Michigan.
Mea culpa.
Busy little beavers, ain’t they?
Nitpick: the concept of nuclear war was about a century too late for Wells. The big ideas in his time were evolution and Marxism. The morlock/eloi split came because class stratification had become so ingrained for so long that the two populations had diverged into separate species - the child-like eloi descended from the capitalist and bourgeois classes, and lived in a paradise where everything they needed was provided them. The monstrous morlocks descended from the working classes, and kept the subterranean machines running that provided the eloi’s Eden, but would come out at night and drag eloi back to their caves to be eaten.
Nitpick to your nitpick : while nuclear war wasn’t an element of The Time Machine as you state, Wells wrote a nuclear war story, The World Set Free.
Cool, didn’t know that one! I googled “first nuclear war novel” and didn’t get anything before the ‘50s, but I suspect I was getting results for “accurate” nuclear war, not “priming an atom bomb with your teeth and dropping it from a biplane.”
Counter nitpick: I was talking about the film. I thought the film made it clear that there had been a nuclear war. First, because they actually showed one (‘Take cover before the mushrooms start sprouting!’); and second, because it was released in 1960 when nuclear war was on everybody’s mind.
Of course that doesn’t negate anything else you wrote.
I remember seeing the movie at ten and, not having read the novel yet, exclaimed, “How did H.G. Wells know about atomic bombs!”
“Um, that’s not in the book, son.”
You’re not crazy, I saw the 1960 film, though I’m not sure that’s the only film adaptation.
“THE MUSHROOMS ARE GONNA BE SPROUTIN’”. jeezy, so cheesy.
There have been a couple, IIRC. But what got me the most was the Detroit-style people mover in one scene.