HG Wells' the Time Machine reminds me of the contemporary state of the world and its problems that can actually be reduced to three attributes: environmental causes, political conditions, and economic conditions.

Environmental conditions:

The Eloi seem at first sight to be a peaceful Utopian community who, although not intellectual, has used technology to control their environment and to make it work for them. Only through the duration of the book and more significantly much later, does the narrator realize that the activities of the Eloi have actually despoiled the environment. The traveler travels ahead to approximately 30 million years ahead of his own time and sees lecherous insects swarm over the country and ravage it. The further he travels, the more closely he sees the earth's rotation gradually cease, the planet become increasingly colder, and the Earth become a more forbidding, dank, and lifeless place. Eloi and similar civilizations...
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