The Time Machine is one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time. It is an adventure story documenting the Time Traveller's travel into the future by a machine constructed by him. Once there, he discovered that society, as he knows it, has fallen into ruins. All that is left are remnants of crumbling buildings and overgrown vegetation. He comes in contact with two species instead of modern humans. Much of the novel concerns the Time Traveller's horrifying discovery of this divided world. It gradually becomes apparent that the novel is more than an adventure story; it is also a parable about the ultimate kind of society stratified by class, by those who have and those who do not.