I remember this as if it happened moments ago. .d.
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Science fiction was sure one of those moments for me too. I was a very late reader for a lot of reasons, and so my real reading started with HG Wells, The Time Machine in the eighth grade. I had to use a dictionary to get through it. The style was so strange that it was as if the reading itself was part of the magical quality.
Thinking about it, I re-read it this evening. It still has a certain power over my imagination:
``The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Under-grounders I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the Morlocks-that, by the by, was the name by which these creatures were called-I could imagine that the modification of the human type was even far more profound than among the Eloi, the beautiful race that I already knew.''
I also have to say when he leaves the world of the Eloi and arrives near the end of time on a desolate beach of black sand, under the vast hull of a red sun, with nothing but lichen on the rocks, and giant crabs closing in on their prey---that was just about the creepiest scene I had ever read. Much better than Poe. And of course he goes a little further on until even the crabs are gone.
Those scenes stuck with me like a formative nightmare for a long time. They still have some effect, but not like the first time. It was so invitable, so obviously the consequence of evolution carried out to its nth-degree, winding down as the earth itself had.
I saw all the movies of it, but none ever really captured the underlying darkness in the story. And of course all of them obscure its heavy leftwing message. I actually never realized how blatant that message was until tonight.
Oh, well, lets return to the brilliant present and the great battle to liberate Falluja...
CG