Eloi

The Eloi are one of the two fictional species of post-humans, along with the Morlocks, in H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine.

==In H. G. Wells' The Time Machine== By the year AD 802,701, humanity has diverged into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi live a banal life of ease on the surface of the Earth while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing, and inventory for the Eloi. The narration suggests that the divergence of species may have been the result of a widening separation between social classes. The Eloi are suggested to be the descendants of a privileged, surface-dwelling, upper class, which once dominated the subterranean working class. The Time Traveller, the story's protagonist, surmises that the surface-dwelling civilization had reached its zenith and devolved into decadence and indifference. Meanwhile, the "underworlders", who supported the surface world, grew accustomed to labour and harsh, underground existence, and degenerated into the Morlocks. At some point, the Morlocks, who had continued providing for the helpless Eloi (the Time Traveller guesses this may at first have been out of tradition or intrinsic habit) began feeding on their above-ground counterparts and now raise them like cattle to serve as their food supply, consuming the Eloi after being allowed to breed.