The Time Machine is a scientific romance that helped invent the genre of science fiction and the time travel story. This edition features a contextual introduction, detailed explanatory notes, and two essays Wells wrote just prior to the publication of his first book.

Roger Luckhurst has written widely on Victorian popular fiction, science fiction and Gothic literature. He has edited Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stoker's Dracula, and an anthology of Late Victorian Gothic Tales for Oxford World's Classics, and an edition of H. P. Lovecraft's Classic Horror Stories. His books include The Mummy's Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford, 2012).