The central character, referred to throughout as the Time Traveller, tells a group of friends that he has invented a machine which can travel through time, enabling him to investigate the destiny of the human species. In the year 802701, where he is temporally stranded, he finds the meek and beautiful Eloi living in apparently idyllic circumstance, but discovers that they are the prey of the degenerate Morlocks, descendants of labourers who have lived underground for centuries. In the later era he sees the life-forms which survive the extinction of man, and thirty million years hence he is witness to the world’s final decline as the sun cools.