This small novella tells the tale of two impossibly intertwined gentlemen living in Victorian London---the friendly and sociable Dr Jekyll, and the monstrously deformed, obviously dangerous Mr Hyde. As Mr Hyde's crimes gain the attention of the police, the manhunt is on; but every lead on Hyde consistently leads back to Jekyll instead. When the darker truth of Hyde's identity becomes clear to all, that the monstrous predator of London's industrial-fog enshrouded streets is none other than Jekyll himself, transformed by a tincture of his own making, he sets forth to destroy himself and bring down Hyde with him. Allegedly written within a single week under the influence of cocaine, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of Scottish prose-poet Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous and influential works. It has been remade and adapted into numerous other mediums, including film, television, stage performance, and graphic novel; endlessly quoted in a host of derivative works, speeches, and religious sermons; it even served as the foundation of Freudian psychology and the inspiration for Freud's allegorical tale, The Beast Within. It is widely considered to be the quintessential tale on the duality of the individual, and the danger of suppressing humanity's baser instincts for the outward appearance of morality.

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H. G. Wells's classic novel The Time Machine, first published in 1895, is one part fairy tale, one part love story, one part science fiction, and one part utopia. Readers can enjoy the story on multiple levels and take away something unique to themselves upon finishing the novel. With every turn of the page, we become as little children being read a good night story; for in effect, we are being read to rather than reading ourselves. The story is told through an unnamed narrator, a young member of an informal group of men who meet occasionally at the Time Traveler's house for dinner, drinks, cigars, and conversation. It is no accident that the narrator who tells us the story is the least skeptical, indeed the most credulous of the group, in response to the Time Traveler's claim to have built a Time Machine. We need an optimistic and trusting narrator, for he represents the audacity of hope, the possibility of human endeavor leading to improvement and progress, at a time when the specter of social Darwinism and scientific fatalism had fallen over the western world. The narrator is the one who exclaims, in response to the prospect of traveling into the future, "To discover a society erected on a strictly communistic basis." As humorous and naive as such a statement sounds to us today, communism was a synonym for utopia in the late nineteenth century. And so we are supposed to identify with the narrator, to suspend our disbelief in the absurd hypothesis of time as the fourth dimension and the fantastical invention of a time machine. During the time when we submit to the power of the story and allow ourselves to be swept away by the fantasy, time machine does exist and time travel is possible.

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