The Island Of Doctor Moreau [Hardcover]

H.G Wells really knew how to write a sci-fi book with insight and style; The Island of Dr. Moreau has tons of both. Truly, Wells was far ahead of his time.

The story starts off with Robert Prendick sailing across the Atlantic, possibly in the Caribbean, heading back to England. The captain of the ship, drunk and out of his mind, has Prendick thrown overboard. Alone, in the ocean, with no chance of survival, Prendick gives up hope and waits to die. Remarkably, a small ship arrives just in time, and they bring Prendick aboard. Among the crew of his rescuers is a small man, covered in fur, with sharp teeth and off-colored eyes. Strange as this man might be, Prendick is to weak to press the crew for an explanation on where this man has come from.

The rescue party takes Prendick to a small island known to most as The Island of Dr. Moreau - the famous chemist/biologist/geneticist (as far as such men existed back in those days). Arriving on the island, Prendick finds this to be a small and not overly amazing place to inhabit while he waits for another ship from England to arrive and take him the rest of the way home. In the meantime, he is to be the good doctors guest, and is attended to by the doctor's odd, grunting, meowling servants.

Prendick eventually discovers that the people inhabiting and working on the island, are in fact animal human hybrids. They were designed to be the best of both worlds: combining human intelligence with the abilities and skills of the animal kingdom. After his frightening discovery, Prendick stumbles into a commune of deformed and mildly crazy half human, half animal men living in the caves and cliffs of the island. These animal-men have a very peculiar religion based on the negation of all things animalistic: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not eat meat...and so on. All the while, they worship their master and God, Dr. Moreau.

Eventually, all @#$% breaks loose on the island, and Prendick is left to fend for himself against hords of powerful, crazed, and blood thirsty beast-men.

This was a great novel that dives into the questions surrounding human morality, genetic engineering, and the ideas of the soul.

I highly recommend this title.

Although it is less often read than such Wells novels as THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, the basic story of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU is very well known through several extremely loose film adaptations. Pendrick, a British scientist, is shipwrecked--and by chance finds himself on an isolated island where Dr. Moreau and his assistant Montgomery are engaged in a series of experiments. They are attempting to transform animals into manlike beings.

Wells, a social reformer, was a very didactic writer, and his novels reflect his thoughts and theories about humanity. Much of Wells writing concerns (either directly or covertly) social class, but while this exists in MOREAU it is less the basic theme than an undercurrent. At core, the novel concerns the then-newly advanced theory of natural selection--and then works to relate how that theory impacts man's concept of God. Wells often touched upon this, and in several novels he broaches the thought that if mankind evolved "up" it might just as easily evolve "down," but nowhere in his work is this line of thought more clearly and specifically seen than here.

At times Wells' determination to teach his reader can overwhelm; at times it can become so subtle that it is nothing short of absolutely obscure. But in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, Wells achieves a perfect balance of the two extremes, even going so far as to balance the characters in such a way that not even the narrator emerges as entirely sympathetic. It is a remarkable achievement, and in this sense I consider MOREAU possibly the best of Wells work: the novel is as interesting for the story it tells as it is for still very relevant themes it considers.

It is also something of an oddity among Wells work, for while Wells often included elements of horror and savagery in his novels, MOREAU is not so much horrific as it is disturbingly gruesome and occasionally deliberately distasteful. This is not really a book than you can read and then put away: it lingers in your mind in a most unsettling way. Strongly recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

While this HG Wells novel is one of the least read by present day sci-fi enthusiasts, due to the high implausibility of the story involved, it does give us an interesting insight into human behavior at the end of this somewhat gruesome tale. Our hero is, at first, quite uncomfortable around the man-beasts which are present on the island, but, over time, he grows more used to their uniqueness and animalistic behaviors. When transported back to the mainland, at the stories end, he now finds that people, in their everyday activities, cause him the same unease he felt when he arrived at the island. He no longer can trust them as he once did. HG Wells identified the animal characteristics that we all possess and, at times, are in full repression of. In truth, humans are an untrustworthy lot.