The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells (1896)

In January of 1888, a brig sailing between Samoa and California, discovered a man floating alone in a small open boat and rescued him. The man was Edward Prendick. Eleven months earlier he had been on a ship which collided with a derelict vessel and he was thought to have drowned. The tale he told his rescuers was so strange that they believed the solitude and danger he went through had made him mad.
His tale was thus:

After the collision he managed to climb onto a dinghy and some days later a schooner carrying a menagerie of savage beasts chanced to pick him up.
Montgomery, a man with a scientific background, was on board and he had been collecting animals to take back to an uncharted island in the Pacific where he worked with Dr Moreau, a scientist engaged in vivisection and bizarre experiments.
After an incident with the drunken captain, Prendick was evicted from the ship and stranded on the island when Montgomery disembarked. Moreau and Montgomery reluctantly allowed Prendick onto the island as his only other option was to drift in the ocean in an unseaworthy boat until he succumbed to the elements.
Bit by bit the secrets of this island began to reveal themselves. Moreau was breaking the laws of nature by experimenting with vivisection, blending one animal with another, and had created the strange ‘Beast People.’

‘Scarcely six weeks passed before I had lost every feeling but dislike and abhorrence for these infamous experiments of Moreau’s. My one idea was to get away from these horrible caricatures of my Maker’s image, back to the sweet and wholesome intercourse of men.’

Augustin Filon, a contemporary reviewer of the book, said that Moreau’s ‘...absurd and sublime dream is that of condensing the innumerable slow stages of evolution into a few weeks or months.’

However, one of Moreau’s victims escapes from his laboratory and attacks the scientist. The taste of blood causes the creature to relapse and incites the rest of the ‘Beast Creatures’ to similar behaviour. As they start to revert to their former animal states the island becomes a very dangerous place to be.

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a work of science fiction but it raises ethical questions that are relevant for today. In the pursuit of scientific knowledge and advancement, what ethical dilemmas should be considered beforehand? Even though we have the capabilities to push biological boundaries, how far should we allow ourselves to go?
This is an interesting book and H.G. Wells was a superb writer. I think it would be a good book for biology students to read & discuss but some sensitive souls may want to give it a miss.



Linking to Back to the Classics: An Abandoned Classic. I started reading this a few years ago but I wasn't in the mood for it then. As much as I enjoy this author's literary gift, his subjects are often a tad depressing!

Chocky by John Wyndham (1968)

John Wyndham is known for his ‘logical fantasies’ which have been described as modified science fiction. I’ve previously read his The Day of the Triffids and enjoyed that. Chocky is quite a different story. It has a slower pace and doesn’t have much action to speak of but it has plenty of thoughtful and interesting ideas.

Matthew is an ordinary eleven year old boy whose parents begin to get concerned when he starts talking to an imaginary friend. His younger sister, Polly, when she was around the age of five, disrupted the family for some time with her invisible friend, Piff. A family outing for a meal required a mystified waitress to add an extra chair for Piff or Polly would disturb her Dad at a critical moment in a movie by calling out from her room that Piff was in desperate need of a drink of water.
The problem was that Matthew wasn’t a five year old. He was eleven and his imaginary friend, Chocky, was asking him some very complicated questions and causing him to say some startling things.
The situation came to a head when Matthew inexplicably performed a feat that was beyond him and the media got word of it. Reporters started turning up at the family home or waylaid Matthew on his way home from school. Matthew also began to draw attention to himself by the unusual art work he was producing, something he’d never shown talent for previously. His maths teacher quizzed his parents about who was the mathematician in the family who had been teaching Matthew advanced concepts. Matthew had been getting muddled with some teaching on the binary code but when his parents showed their lack of mathematical ability the teacher was perplexed and expressed his concern that this 'new-found knowledge' was confusing Matthew.

Matthew's parents decided to take Matthew to a psychiatrist. This worthy doctor's opinion (or so he made them believe) was that there was nothing to worry about and he tried to relieve their anxiety by telling them that the fantasy would break up of itself and disperse.
However, the psychiatrist had found the problem fascinating and became excited at what he discovered when he put Matthew under hypnosis (without his parent’s knowledge or consent!). The implications to him were like finding gold.

The little blurb on the front cover of my book stars that the story is ‘disturbing in an entirely unexpected way.’ 
Chocky was first published in 1968 and it has a slightly dated feel in some ways so the part I found most disturbing was the behaviour of the psychiatrist!
Matthew’s father is the narrator and he’s quite matter-of-fact so the story stays on an even keel. I really liked the author's handling of the dynamics between father and son and the interplay between the very ordinary and the bizarre in the story.
There is some suspense, more so towards the end, but there’s also some light relief in the form of family dynamics. I think if the book had been written a few decades later, or if it was made into a movie now, it could really be quite sinister.
The ending was very science fiction-ish and unbelievable but I don’t know that it could have ended any other way. Overall it was a good read with some interesting ideas to ponder.

Chocky was a book I became aware of when I visited the Armitt Museum in Ambleside a couple of months ago and looked at some of the PNEU (Parent's National Education Union) material that had been used for students in Years 9/10.

Back to the Classics 2019: Classic Novella (153 pgs)

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

‘No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.’

So H.G. Wells began in what was to be the first modern science fiction novel. The planet Mars had been cooling; its oceans had shrunk and the planet was in the last stages of exhaustion. 
‘The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened heir hearts.’

As the Martians looked upon the earth with their advanced instruments, they saw what they regarded as inferior creatures, as we would look upon ants. They saw a planet that could offer them an escape from their own doomed orb and they prepared for war.
The anonymous narrator of The War of the Worlds witnesses the first arrival of the Martians in Britain and documents their actions and his experiences of their invasion.

 Martian Emerges, Henrique Alvim Corrêa, 1906

Reading The War of the Worlds in 2018, it does come across as sensational and dated at times, but to readers living in the 19th Century before the invention of flight, let alone space travel, it would have been an entirely different experience; one which would have been quite confronting and perhaps terrifying to some.

It’s been said that The War of the Worlds is a critique of imperialism; a political allegory of the climate prior to World War I, more than a work of science fiction. Wells made comments throughout the book that seemed to reflect this idea. It took some time after the Martians came for humans to move from complacency to action which suggests a sense of superiority or hubris, and even then the action wasn’t a collective response but every man to himself, more or less.

'For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well...I felt the first inkling of a thing that grew quite presently clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.'

Abandoned London, Henrique Alvim Corrêa

'And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.'

Wells described a Martian as possessing a tentacled brain. They were genderless, with no digestive system, and received nourishment by drinking the blood of humans while they were still alive...
Their behaviour towards the people on the earth was compared to that between humans and ants.

 Martian Viewing Drunken Crowd, Henrique Alvim Corrêa

"This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants."

'By ten o’clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body.'

The War of the Worlds is a work of literature, beautifully written by a skilled wordsmith, so I found much to enjoy in my reading of it. However, I wasn’t so enamoured by the whole Martian thing and a few times I felt like skipping some parts of the book...I didn't, and preferred the latter part of the book much more than the earlier parts.

The book is scheduled as a free read in Ambleside Online Year 10. I think it’s a good fit there and would appeal to anyone who likes the science fiction genre. I much prefer dystopian fiction but I possibly would have enjoyed this book more if I’d read it when I was going through a science fiction stage in my late teens.


This book is part of my 2018 TBR reading challenge. 

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1903-1969)

John Wyndham's novel, The Day of the Triffids, which was published in 1951, is one of the early science fiction novels. The author called it a logical fantasy and it is a very interesting work of speculative fiction. Written in the first-person, it is a reflective and well-written look at the 'what if' of a post apocalyptic world where the majority of the population suddenly goes blind.

Bill Masen chances to be in hospital swathed in eye bandages when the spectacular green meteor showers lit up the sky. When he awakens the next day - the day his bandages are scheduled to be removed - it was to find that everyone who has witnessed the meteor shower has lost their sight.
In the ensuing chaos, bioengineered plants - the venomous, mobile, and carnivorous triffids, already adapted to a sightless existence - use the opportunity to assert control.

'It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that 'it can't happen here' - that's one's own little time and place is beyond cataclysms. And now it 'was' happening here.'

The Day of the Triffids has been on high school reading lists in Australia and New Zealand, even quite recently, and I can understand why. In many ways the story is timeless. Genetic modification, biological warfare, and environmental concerns are even more relevant today than they were in John Wyndham's time, but the author's penetrating observations of the human psyche, morality, and social structures is what I found most compelling.

An essay comparing Wyndham with another British science fiction author, H.G. Wells, said of the former:

'...by fastidiously shrinking back from the sensational, Wyndham found a unique literary voice. He described the odd rather than the fantastic, the disturbing rather than the horrific, the remarkable rather than the outrageous. He dealt in menace, not terror. This quietness of tone was to prove effective and likeable.'


On order & civilisation:

'I was not yet ready to admit, after nearly thirty years of a reasonably right-respecting existence and law-abiding life, that as long as I remained my normal self, things might even yet in some inconceivable way return to their normal. Absurd it undoubtedly was, but I had a very strong sense that the moment I stove-in one if these sheets of plate-glass I should leave the old order behind me for ever: I should become a looter, a sacker, a low scavenger upon the dead body of the system that had nourished me. Such a foolish niceness of sensibility in a stricken world! - and yet it still pleases me to remember that civilised usage did not slide off me at once, and that for a time at least I wandered along past displays which made my mouth water while my already obsolete conventions kept me hungry.'

'I think we'll all have to try to see ourselves not as the robbers of all this, but more as - well, the unwilling heirs to it.'


Some classical allusions:


'In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.'

'Oh, yes, Wells said that, didn't he? - Only in the story it turned out not to be true.'

'The crux of the difference lies in what you mean by the word country - patria in the original,' I said. 'Caecorum in patria luscus rex imperat omnis - a classical gentleman called Fullonius said it first: it's all anyone seems to know about him. But there's no organised patria, no State, here - only chaos. Wells imagined a people who had adapted themselves to blindness. I don't think that is going to happen here - I don't see how it can.'


On loneliness:

'Now, for the first time I began to feel the horror that real loneliness holds for a species that is gregarious by nature. I felt naked, exposed to all the fears that prowled...

Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative - an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary...That day I had learned it was much more. It was something that could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary, and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time it's chance to frighten and frighten horribly - that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...'


On leisure & knowledge & utilitarianism:

'...from my reading of history, the first thing you have to have to use knowledge is leisure. Where everybody has to work hard just to get a living and there is no leisure to think, knowledge stagnates, and people with it. The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive  - by people who appear to be living almost entirely on the work of others, but are, in fact, a long term investment...'





 Linking this post to Back to the Classics 2016 - fantasy, science fiction, or dystopian classic.