"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue."

Basic set up:

In this passage, the Time Traveller describes to his rapt audience what it feels like to travel to the future in his time machine.

H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is one of the early examples of a sci-fi work depicting time travel. In the passage above, we get a pretty awesome description of what it might actually be like to sit in a time machine and travel to the future.

The passage's—and the story's—emphasis on time travel reflects a wider obsession with time travel in sci-fi. Wells may have been one of the first to write about time travel, but he was far from the last. After him loads and loads of Sci-fi writers would take up this theme because, well, because time travel is just plain awesome.

The narrator in the above passage conveys to us the feeling of time travel through very concrete details. As the narrator moves forward in time, "night follow[s] day like the flapping of a black wing." The sun hops "swiftly across the sky."

In other words, we get very strong sensory and visual description in this passage. We can almost see the days following each other like "the flapping of a black wing," and the way that the sun moves quickly across the sky. Through these details, the narrator conveys to us just what it might feel like to travel forward in time.

Sci-fi writers don't corner the market on vivid imagery, but they certainly write with a vividness that often puts so-called literary fiction to shame.