Social Class Distinctions Within the Time Machine and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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Jack Williams Dr. Scott Science Fiction & Cultural Cosmopolitanism 24 February 2015 Social Class Distinctions Within The Time Machine and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? H.G. Well's The Time Machine and Phillip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (DADOES) offer interesting considerations about the nature of humanity, its distinguishing characteristics, and the consequences of its existence on future events. In view of these considerations, this paper will explore the similarities and the differences between these works with respect to their treatments of social class distinctions. It will first preface the structure of the social classes in each of their presentations, and then compare their resemblances. Both works share a core similarity: the conflicts between different classes of individuals are central to the events of their respective plots. But where The Time Machine and DADOES differ is the source of this clash. In the former, the cause is taxonomic, and in the latter, it is the presence of empathy or lack thereof. Although both novels occur in a time ahead of their original transcriptions, The Time Machine is set much further into the future, in the year 802,701 AD. In such a distant time, mankind has survived, but has been altered substantially. Centuries of crushing economic inequality and vastly different labor demands have yielded a biological separation, a widening gulf that is due to, The length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich...will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification (Wells 48). In other words, the constant struggle between these classes has produced two species, “above ground you must
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