The Island of Dr. Moreau

Back in the earlier days of the blog, I made three separate posts on novels by H. G. Wells, one of the most imaginative and famous science fiction writers in history. He's responsible for some of the earliest takes on broad concepts like time travel and alien invasions. Here in his well known The Island of Dr. Moreau, from 1896, he explores the slightly less original realm of biological engineering. Mary Shelley had already written Frankenstein, the godfather of the genetic-tinkering-as-horror trope that can be traced right up through Jurassic World, some eighty years prior. And with Darwin's theories and findings exploding in popularity in the late nineteenth century, biology and the link between animals and men was already on everybody's mind.

In any case, this book was just fine. It was a short and easy read, like everything else I've seen from Wells, and it holds up better today than so much else from the 1800s. The title character is an remorselessly mad scientist who lives on an island hybridizing animals and trying to turn them into people. By splicing sections of, say, a boar and a dog together, he's somehow created a strange array of man-beasts. The science in this one is particularly bad with hindsight, but that doesn't really matter. What matter are the themes and questions Wells touches on here. Do these creatures suffer? Are they men, or are they beasts? Is it okay, or at least less bad, for beasts to suffer than for men to suffer? Wells doesn't dig very deep. but these are still interesting topics to consider.