H.G. Wells Part 2

Invisible Man

His fifth novel is another morality story involving a different mad scientist.  Plot is simple: scientist develops an process to make himself invisible and uses it on himself, but can't reverse it.  It has an interesting flash back narrative, where the scientist Griffin starts out invisible and covered in bandages and has to befriend someone after his invisibility is exposed to people in an inn and enlists the help of someone named Marvel.  Griffin also finds a former colleague named Kemp and recounts his story to him, but he has already turned to a life of crime and terror at this point and Kemp becomes his main target.

Having the protagonist also be an somewhat interesting, but generally unsympathetic villain is an interesting take that not many authors have tried before.  Partly the invisibility drove Griffin to his crimes since he could no longer live a normal life, but for the most part he seems like more of an arrogant jerk who was looking for an excuse to go bad.  The fact that the invisibility is permanent is a interesting variation compared to most fictional invisibility that came later, which normally is easier to control in most later fiction.  Griffin's character is also a good contrast to Kemp who is willing to sacrifice himself to stop Griffin terrorism even though none of this is Kemp's fault.  The novel also ends on a nice twist leaving the reader to wonder what the future consequences of this technology will be.

The novel has aged fairly well since it is mainly character and moral dilemma/temptation driven.  Its appropriate to teen readers and above and is probably his most generally accessible work out of these four novels.

War of the Worlds

His sixth and most famous novel (thanks in part to Orson Welles' famous radio play), this is an example of the invasion literature that was popular in England at the time with space aliens substituting for the usual German invaders.  Explosions are seen on Mars and soon after "meteors" land in England.  They contain tripod shaped alien machines that make quick work of the British military through heat rays and black smoke weapons.  The second half of the book deals with the aftermath with the martians collecting people with the tentacles and draining them of their blood for nourishment.  Eventually the main character gives up hope, when he realizes they have all died from bacteria.

It was considered a bit brutal at the time in its depictions of violence, but its fairly tame by today's standards. Its main problem is that it has been copied so much that it doesn't feel very fresh anymore and the ending is too much of a dues ex machina ending for most readers.  The martians are unstoppable for almost the entire book and then they just drop dead.  If you don't mind that, its still an entertaining read.

All four of these have been turned into feature films and have had many imitators in books and film.  All of them are appropriate for early teen readers, though the language may take a bit of getting used to unless they have read other Victorian era books beforehand.

H.G. Wells Part 1

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.