And Moreau stands behind only Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll in the Mad Scientist Infamy stakes. It’s Wells’s own Heart of Darkness three years before Joseph Conrad even published his novel. Doctor Moreau is a man-turned-monster, operating beyond civilization in the Pacific, splicing hybrid creatures into animal-men. One of many seditious elements, then, in this body-horror classic, is how, in only his second novel, Wells flipped this archetype to find the beast within. Wells and other early science-fiction writers loved their noble hero-scientists. Bedford in Infinite Space”, in which our narrator undergoes a near-breakdown of the self - and space and time - that looks forward to Stanley Kubrick’s “ultimate trip” ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey, there’s much here that finds Wells at his scientific and imaginative best. And with its astute descriptions of interstellar weightlessness and a late chapter entitled “Mr. It centres on two wannabe astronauts, businessman/narrator Bedford and physicist Cavor, whose invention of the gravity-defying material cavorite initiates their trip.ĭiscovering an environment with plentiful gold, where you can get drunk on giant fungal growths, they also encounter the moon’s intelligent insect-like natives the Selenites - surely the inspiration for sci-fi’s countless “space bugs” (see Dune, Starship Troopers, John Carter of Mars, et al). Jules Verne may have beaten him to a lunar landing in print with 1865’s From the Earth to the Moon, but Wells’s own mission is perhaps one of his more underrated stories. One of these, The Shape of Things to Come (1933) even became the basis for an early British science-fiction film classic, Things to Come (1936). He garnered great acclaim for later social realist books such as Kipps (1905) and his own favourite, Tongo-Bungay (1909), as well as a series of futuristic Utopian novels. In a long and varied career, Wells produced an astonishing burst of science fiction in a first decade of writing overlapping the 19th and 20th centuries, that still forms the basis for much of the genre’s influences and inspirations.Ī former biologist and formidable intellect, Wells wrote much more than science fiction, or “scientific romances” as they were then called. The title of “the father of science fiction” is commonly thought to apply to one of three men: Jules Verne, the esteemed French author of, among others, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) Hugo Gernsback, publisher of the prominent 1920s American magazine Amazing Stories, and in whose honour the annual World Science Fiction Convention awards are named the “Hugos” and Herbert George Wells, the four-time Nobel Prize-nominated, prolific British writer and social commentator. HG Wells was once called the Shakespeare of Science Fiction. And though this unseen foe doesn’t sport the trademark bandaged face and hat (a more detailed report is below), any discussion of the character inevitably brings up – once again – the name of his original creator, HG Wells. Don’t look now, but a radical new reinvention of The Invisible Man is upon us.
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