Nothing more ridiculous than out-dated scifi

Honestly, there's nothing more ridiculous that out-dated science fiction - said I must admit by someone who's not a fan of scifi in particular, though I guess I've read some of the classics and a # of young adult scifi novels when I was in fact a young adult. But now, why am I doing this? Well, I am always in search of great novellas, because I love the form, I think it's under-appreciated and under-populated, and I think novellas are the ideal format for our book group  - and came across an online list of great novellas, many of which I'd read and about which I concur, so decided to pursue some I hadn't read - leading me of all things to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. I will give it one more day, to see if it picks up on 2nd try, but over the first 50 or so pages - it is a creaky, clunky vehicle to put it mildly. The idea of a time machine in itself is by now so shopworn - but I guess Wells was among the first to explore the concept, and the first chapter is a scientist's explanation to some skeptics about time's being the 4th dimension - very familiar thinking to us today but no doubt novel in Wells's. Then he shows off this contraption he's made to catapult people forward or backward in time; of course this machine with levels and bars or quartz is ludicrous to us today - but I still was interested, thinking about how in a sense computers and laptops are the time machine that Wells envisioned, essentially erasing the time for communication among people across the planet and the time for passing of information that is far more remarkable than, though in a sense similar to, the time travel that Wells posited. So that's where the novella becomes really ridiculous: if you have to send your scientist on a time journey, can't something more interesting or even credible happen than an encounter with wordless 4-foot-tall creatures? The beauty of travel to other civilizations, whether across time or space (cf. Swift, not Tom, Jonathan), is they way in which the newly discovered culture helps us understand or re-examine our own. That, at least so far, does not happen at all in the Time Machine - at least for starters. Will he move it in other directions - for example, travel into the past and the effect that messing with past events, if even possible, would have on the present? I'll stay with him a little while longer to see - but so far, Time Machine is just a quaint curiosity.