The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

First published in 1896

The Island of Dr Moreau is H.G. Wells’ novel about a mad scientist who takes the idea of anthropomorphizing animals to an extreme. It is a horror story, but it explores a number of philosophical questions as the horror unfolds.

Edward Prendick, a biologist, is near death when he is rescued from a lifeboat after being forced to abandon ship. When he recovers his senses, he finds himself on a schooner with a drunken captain, a doctor named Montgomery, a deformed man who attends the doctor, a caged puma, and an angry pack of muzzled dogs.

Montgomery, having been booted out of medical school in London, is on his way to an isolated island. Through no fault of his own, Prendick is booted off the ship, leaving him with no choice but to join Montgomery on the island.

The island, of course, is home to the mysterious Dr. Moreau. It’s probably impossible to spoil a story this old, but I won’t say much more about the plot, except to note that Prendick encounters creatures who are “human in shape, and yet human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal. Each of these creatures, despite its human form, its rag of clothing, and the rough humanity of its bodily form, had woven into it, into its movements, into the expression of its countenance, into its whole presence, some now irresistible suggestion of a hog, a swinish taint, the unmistakable mark of the beast.”

That quotation gives you a sense of Wells’ prose style which, to readers raised on genre authors who write eight word sentences and three sentence paragraphs, might seem laborious. Perhaps it is, but it is a style uniquely Wells’ own.

Prendick discovers that human-like beasts on the island are (rather reluctantly) following a set of laws. Transgressions are enforced by punishment that is “sharp and sure.” But, just as the promise of swift punishment does little to deter criminal behavior or misbehaving children, threatening to punish beasts who eat the flesh of other animals (or humans) isn’t likely to change their nature. And like all systems of punishment-based law, the system does no good if those who violate the law are not caught.

Philosophical questions that the novel raises include the difference between man and beast and the justice of a system that forces the island’s inhabitants to live in fear of laws they do not understand. The novel could be viewed as an allegory of legal systems and particularly of religious law, where obedience is coerced by instilling fear of punishment by a higher power. It can also be seen as an indictment of totalitarian government, where the “sayer of the law” uses ruthless tactics to dictate obedience among the masses, who are viewed as incapable of governing themselves (or whose self-governance is feared). And the novel can be seen as a caution against attempts to replace the natural with the unnatural, perhaps a forerunner of the debate about genetic engineering. On a simpler level, while the novel isn’t very frightening when viewed as a horror story, it is an entertaining tale, made all the more interesting by convincing characters, both man and beast (and in-between).

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War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

First published in 1898

One of the characters in War of the Worlds talks about how people live their lives in fear. They buy insurance because they fear catastrophe. They work at jobs they hate because they fear a loss of security. They scurry home and stay indoors because they are afraid of the dark. On Sundays they fear the hereafter. They want only “safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world.” Now they have something real to fear -- Martians. Even after the invasion, some will be happy to be caught and caged, because to “submit to persecution and the will of the Lord” is easy, and what people really fear is thinking for themselves.

I think that little speech by a soldier in the second part of War of the Worlds highlights one of the novel’s best themes. You’re either content to be a rabbit in a cage or you have the will to take risks. The soldier thinks that most people can’t be saved from the Martians but most aren’t worth saving. Knowledge and ideas are worth saving, the sum of human accomplishment. With time and rescued knowledge, humankind will be able to fight the Martians (or so the soldier hopes), to stage a comeback after a devastating defeat. But is that realistic or is it folly? The book’s narrator calls the soldier a “strange undisciplined dreamer of great things,” but perhaps those are the people we should strive to be in time of crisis.

Focused myopically on their own lives, early twentieth century humans failed to appreciate that Martians might exist or that humans might have something Martians would desire: a healthy planet. Mars and the life it sustains are coming to an end. The Martians want Earth.

The narrator of War of the Worlds is curious when a cylindrical object crashes near his home. He’s still curious when the top unscrews and creatures with tentacles scramble into the crater that was created by their crashing vessel. He’s vexed when the creatures assemble a heat ray that systematically sets trees, buildings, and people on fire. Fortunately, the sweep of the heat ray is not extensive (hiding behind the nearest hill provides adequate protection) so the narrator assumes the military will make short work of the Martians. That assumption gives way to panic when more cylinders fall and mechanized tripods begin to wander about, deploying heat rays and poisonous black clouds to wipe out cities and their defenses.

As you probably know, the Martians kick human butt for most of the novel. War of the Worlds is about badly behaving Martians, but it is also about badly behaving humans. Running from the Martians, people trample each other, throw each other from escaping boats, take advantage of weakness, and generally put their own lives above everyone else’s. The narrator’s brother is an exception, and there are a few others, including the soldier mentioned at the beginning of this review, but Wells’ view of mankind as a whole is rather dim. The epilogue, on the other hand, suggests an optimistic vision of the future.

Most people who have not read The War of the Worlds probably know how it ends, but I won’t spoil it for those who don’t. I will say only that the ending is a testament not only to Wells’ vivid imagination, but to his understanding that human beings (and even Martians) are not necessarily the most powerful entities in this vast universe. It is only hubris that makes us (or Martians) believe we thrive and survive because we are superior. Wells makes clear that humility always defeats hubris. That is the other timeless theme that makes The War of the Worlds an enduring contribution to the history of literature.

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H.G. Wells: The Dover Reader

Published by Dover on February 17, 2016

H.G. Wells is rightly regarded as a pioneer of science fiction. The four novels/novellas collected in this edition have all been filmed, some more than once, which attests to Wells’ skill as a story-teller. As a prose stylist, Wells created rambling, ponderous sentences that require the reader to engage in a good amount of labor before reaching the end. It is nevertheless a style that tends to grow on readers, contributing to the continued popularity of his books. But Wells’ popularity is primarily due to his imaginative creation of themes that modern science fiction writers continue to embrace.

The novellas in this Dover edition are:

The Time Machine (1895) - Probably the most “literary” of Wells’ works, The Time Machine is important in the history of science fiction as one of the first widely-read time travel stories. The distant future Wells imagines, populated by above-ground Eloi and underground Morlocks, is a forerunner of novels that depict a dystopian future. The novel might best be seen as an allegory of class struggle, although scholars have blessed it with a variety of academic interpretations. The Time Machine is probably the most discussed of Wells’ works, and it might be his most popular, given the number of times it has been adapted to film, television, and comics, as well as the number of books and stories that have been derived from it or paid tribute to it.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) - Wells ventured into horror with this story of a biologist who is stranded on a remote island with a doctor and a “mad scientist” whose experiments have transformed animals into man-like beasts. A forerunner of modern novels that address genetic experimentation, The Island of Dr. Moreau is notable for its exploration of the difference (and more importantly, the similarity) between man and beast.

The Invisible Man (1897) - A scientist experimenting with optics figures out how to bend light in a way that makes him invisible. While largely an adventure story, the novella has a moral lesson, as the scientist, who uses his discovery for nefarious purposes, comes to a bad end. The novella’s literary value comes from the sympathy that Wells creates for the scientist, even as Wells makes it clear that the Invisible Man is responsible for his own undoing.

War of the Worlds (1898) - One of the first popular stories to imagine contact between humans and aliens, War of the Worlds was famously adapted as a radio play that shook up the nation, and has been filmed repeatedly. In addition to working as an adventure story, the novel touches on important issues of imperialism, evolution, and religion. War of the Worlds is one of the most influential works in the history of science fiction, having inspired an entire subgenre of “alien invasion” stories, most of which (the ones in which aliens are imagined as evil lizards) are quite awful in comparison to Wells’ story.

Wells wrote some or all of these works as serials, so they overlapped a bit, but the fact that he was able to produce four of the most important works of science fiction in roughly four years is stunning. No literature class that covers science fiction would be complete without including at least one of Wells’ novels.

The Dover collection also includes five short stories of varying quality: “The Stolen Bacillus,” “The Country of the Blind,” “The Purple Pileus,” “The Crystal Egg,” and “The Door in the Wall.” They are all entertaining, but readers will get more bang for their buck from Wells’ longer works.

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