Considered one of the fathers of science fiction, Wells wrote dozens of novels starting in the late 19th century as well as dozens more non-fiction books that often dealt with science, history, and socialism. The novels sometimes come of as a bit dated today and the actual science is fairly week. Even though Wells was fairly educated on scientific matters the science fiction is usually just an excuse to advance the plot, which was often a morality tale. But they are still entertaining quick reads for the most part and are extremely influential with many films and other books based around the themes he first wrote about. They popularized ideas like alien invasions and time travel, which have become staples of science fiction over the last century.
Time Machine
His first novel is probably the weakest of the four I mention in these posts as far as plot goes, but it is a decent read and popularized the idea of time travel. The basic plot is a man invents a time machine and travels over 800,000 thousand years into the future. Mankind has been transformed into two races the lazy and peaceful Eloi and the brutal workers known as Morlocks. The time traveler rescues an Eloi named Weena and they have to escape an attack from the Morlocks. The time traveler escapes even further into the future and sees the earth as a dying planet rules by crab creatures. He returns to the present to recount his adventure to his contemporaries and then goes further into the future never to return.
People are still using a lot of the themes from this book, but the book itself reads more like a simple socialist morality tale than a really interesting story. The themes of a people losing their humanity because they are either idle or worked to hard is a bit heavy handed and is still being recycled in current movies like Elysium. Most other time travel stories afterwards have dealt with more interesting themes like people going to try to change or observe the past or being fish out of waters in the future. Its not a bad book, but it feels mostly dated and the point is the morality tale not the time travel.
Its appropriate for early teen readers and older, though they may find parts of it a bit boring.
Island of Dr Moreau
This was his third novel and of the four novels I have read by him I think this is easily the most interesting one. The plot revolves around an English shipwreck victim named Prendick who arrives on a Pacific island run by Dr. Moreau. Moreau it turns out has been performing painful experiments on animals like pumas and the result is an island filled with bizarre hybrids like human/pig, hyena/pig, and a bear/dog/horse named M'ling. Moreau has been attempting to turn animals into humans, but they always revert back into the beastly natures despite the restrictions such as no walking on four legs that Moreau imposes on them. Eventually Prendick becomes more used the creations over time, but Moreau is killed by one of his creations. Prendick has to escape the island by raft after the supplies and boats are destroyed. It has a wonderful ending where he arrives back in England and sees the people there reverting back to what he sees as their animal nature and is forced to leave civilization.
This is the most interesting of these novels since the plot is complex and original, there are several detailed characters instead of the bland ones he usually uses, the setting is memorable, and it has interesting moral issues that integrate into the whole story well. He tackles themes of the morality of vivisection and animal experiments, what separates man from animals, how societies attempt to control behavior, and the morality of inflicting cruelty and pain on others in the goal of advancement of science and knowledge. He didn't have any knowledge of modern genetic engineering, but this is an obvious source for future stories about that issue as well as the basic plot is a mad scientist manipulating the nature of living creatures to advance his ideas.
This novel is appropriate for teens though their is a good bit of violence and things like torture are mentioned frequently. It will be interesting to most readers.
The next post will have reviews of Wells' The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds.
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