The Eloi are one of the two post-human races in H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine.
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In The Time Machine
In the year AD 802,701 humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are the spoiled, attractive group, living a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth, while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing and infrastructure for the Eloi. Each class evolved and degenerated from humans of different social classes, a theme that reflects Wells' sociopolitical opinions.
The main difference from their earlier ruler-worker state is that, while the Morlocks continue to support the world's infrastructure and serve the Eloi, the Eloi have undergone significant physical and mental deterioration. Having solved all problems that required strength, intelligence, or virtue, they have slowly become dissolute, frail animals. They are described as being smaller than modern humans, having shoulder-length curly hair, chins that ran to a point, large eyes, small ears, and small mouths with bright red thin lips. They are of sub-human intelligence, though apparently intelligent enough to speak, and they have a primitive language.
While one initially has the impression that the Eloi people live a life of play and toilless abundance, it is revealed that the Morlocks are attending to the Eloi's needs for the same reason a farmer tends cattle: because the Eloi compose most, if not all, of the Morlocks' diet and no longer have any function beyond this.
A censored portion of the book, later published as a separate short story, reveals that a visit by the Time Traveller to the even farther future results in his encountering rabbit-like hopping herbivores, apparently the descendants of the Eloi. They are described as being plantigrade (with longer hind legs) and tailless, being covered with straight greyish hair that "thickened about the head into a Skye terrier's mane", having human-like hands (described as fore feet) and having a roundish head with a projecting forehead and forward-looking eyes that were obscured by lank hair.
In the 2002 movie adaptation of The Time Machine, the Eloi are depicted as identical to modern humans with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
In Dan Simmons' Ilium
In Dan Simmons' Ilium novel, 'Eloi' is a nickname for the lazy, uneducated, and uncultured descendants of the human race after the post-humans have left Earth. The name is a reference to H. G. Wells' Eloi.
Old-style humans and post-humans rule in Simmons' novel, with the Eloi being kept in 'zoos' in restricted areas on Earth. The Eloi are technically adept but don't understand the technology; they regress and unlearn millennia of culture, thought and reason, until they are satisfied with the pleasure of merely existing.
Later use of the name
- The progressive rock band Eloy are named after the race.
- The Elokoi of Brian Caswell's novel Deucalion are presumably inspired by the Eloi, but ones without the dark side of the Morlocks.
- The book Air by Geoff Ryman contains a fictional ethnic minority called the Eloi, whose struggle for autonomy is quashed by a repressive government.
- Scottish social and cultural commentator Gordon P.Clarkson has termed contemporary Mass Culture "Eloi Culture" as he claims that it is creating a society of unthinking passive consumers of "meaningless trivia".
- James Alan Gardner uses the terms "Eloi" and "Morlock" in his novel Expendable to refer to two warring sects of 'glass people.'
- Eloi is the Aramaic word for "my God," as in Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?
See also
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