Wells's early stories in particular (and this is also true of many scientific romances, though their techniques seem to have been ‘tried out’ in the stories) display a visual self-consciousness remarkable in its inventiveness and multiformity. Hence his 1890s fictions ‘conjure’ with causality, space and time in ways that would also become distinctive of the cinema.

The Time Machine

Wells's writing yokes into a striking parallelism with cinema from the outset. The year in which his first great scientific romance, TM, was published was also when the Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph, a virtual ‘space and time machine’ itself, in Ian Christie's phrase. Wells's Time Traveller models the theory of time as the fourth dimension in terms that parallel the technological extension of the photograph's virtual stereoscopy into filmic movement:

He also uses a series of pictures of a man taken at different ages – ‘All these are evidently sections, as it were. Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.’ (TM, p. 5) – as if imagining the course of a life as one vast chronophotograph. He conceives of intermittent subjective movement in time (mentally ‘jump[ing] back’ as he calls it (p. 6)) in terms similar to Henri Bergson's contemporary theory of consciousness and memory. The Time Traveller's machine is, in effect, a vehicle for making such movement both possible and prolonged within ‘objective’ or external time.

To outside observation, the machine's invisible accelerated motion through time is ‘presentation below the threshold’, a kind of subliminal blurring related to the persistence of vision effect that makes the kine matic illusion work. But it is the specific effects on the vision of the Time Traveller himself which are most cinematic (indeed, many of them were more or less directly realised in the 1960 film, principally using stop-motion object- and graphic-animation, time-lapse camerawork, etc., and in the 2002 version by Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) (see Chapter 5)).