Dr. Moreau is working on these strange human-animal hybrids. Leopards, pumas, apes all take on human characteristics as the result of his experiments. They walk on hind legs, master some rudimentary language, and can even be taught to do heavy lifting or work as servants.
Today, this would be enough for an IPO. Moreau Biotechnology would list on the NASDAQ. The good doctor would have a fine mansion in Silicon Valley, and a team of researchers working at his beck and call.
But Victorian England wasn’t as open-minded as the modern capital markets. Unlike the devil-may-care folks of our post-Dolly-the-sheep age, H.G. Wells’s readers were actually horrified by his hyena-swine with human characteristics. They were disgusted by the mutant ape-man servants, unable to see the glorious profit potential of these critters. Just as Detroit is gung-ho about hybrid vehicles, the rest of us need to get excited about hybrid pet-servants.
But this is precisely why The Island of Dr. Moreau , of all of H.G. Wells’s sci-fi offerings, is the most relevant today, the least dated by the more than century of scientific progress that distances us from Victorian England. The brilliance of this book lies in its insightful treatment of a world in which technology has run ahead of our moral sentiments, creating scientific options outside the traditional domain our of values and ethical choices. And that is an angle that doesn’t ever seem to have an expiration date.
This problem stares us in the face, long after the scenarios of 1984 or Brave New World have lost much of their piquancy—a topicality driven (in the case of Orwell) by the Cold War and (in the case of Huxley) by the spread of Henry Ford's mass production mentality. Unlike these other works, T he Island of Dr. Moreau is not sci-fi in which the science is ancillary to the real story, merely a pretext for social commentary. Rather Wells, back in 1896, gets to the crux of the matter, understanding that technology itself can be problematic, and that story-telling may offer a way of circumscribing its equivocal nature, getting to the heart of the matter in a way that scientists themselves are unlikely to do.
The escapism of present-day sci-fi is quite a departure from the zealous moralizing that Wells brought to his books. Fans today enjoy the The Time Machine as a literary forerunner to the special effects adventure films of our own day; but for Wells, the Morlocks of his tale were the heirs of the oppressed workers of industrial England. By the same token, The War of the Worlds is more than just an alien invasion story, but an incisive critique of the colonialist policies of the British Empire. The Island of Dr. Moreau , however, does not rely on ambiguous symbols to make its points. It attacks a type of scientific imperialism, but does so directly, in ways that one could hardly misinterpret.
This story was, of course, seen as timely even when it was first published. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) was founded two years after Wells's novel, and continues to be a major force in the animal rights movement today. The Island of Dr. Moreau also fed into the Darwinian debates of the time. In a turbulent environment in which the respective roles of God and man were under interrogation and redefinition from many quarters, Wells's tale was bound to touch many raw nerves. It still does.
This is a haunting, multi-layered novel that moves beyond the formulaic at every turn. This is more than your typical hero-and- villain tale. Wells brings out sympathetic elements in almost all of the characters. Dr. Moreau is not your insidious bad guy that we expect to find in genre literature, but is all too emblematic of the modern inquiring mind. Nor can we demonize his strange creations, the results of his experiments at vivisection, treating them as mere monsters. They are even more victimized than the narrator, Edward Prendick, stranded upon this island and forced to watch on helplessly as the macabre events move toward their inevitable moment of crisis.
Wells adds many brilliant touches. His depiction of the animal- men repeating their creed is one of the most memorable scenes in science fiction literature. Wells describe a dark hut with “grotesque dim figures, just flicked here and there by a glimmer of light, and all of them swaying in unison and chanting":
Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Yes, the band Devo was apparently paying attention. But this hardly lessens the haunting quality of the passage. In a tragic, symbolic twist—one sadly reminiscent of too many other creeds throughout history—Moreau's maimed creatures are unable to live up to the demands of their proclaimed code of behavior, and gradually fall back into the animalistic ways of their past.
As always with Wells, this is not just escapist literature, but a story with a message. Yet the tale itself is gripping and artfully told. The pacing, the careful unfolding of the story, the vivid portrayal of the characters, both human and otherwise, are all skillfully handled. Wells was only thirty years old when this book was published, and would live another half century. But he would never surpass this exceptional novel, which continues to speak to us, both as potent narrative and cautionary tale.