The Island of Doctor Moreau
- Written By H. G. Wells
The Island of Doctor Moreau
- H. G. Wells
$19.99
When the rules of nature shatter, what remains after?
Adrift after a shipwreck, Edward Prendick finds himself plucked from the sea and carried to a nameless island in the Pacific, home to the reclusive Doctor Moreau. Once a respected physiologist, Moreau has fallen into disgrace after the public learned of his inhumane experiments.
Now on this remote shore, he has continued them without restraint. Behind a locked enclosure, from which terrible cries escape, he is at work reshaping beasts into something altogether different than what is natural and good, something akin to human.
As Prendick comes to grasp the full horror of what Moreau has done, that fragile order begins to crack, and the island slides toward a reckoning all will struggle to survive.
Published in 1896, The Island of Doctor Moreau remains one of the most unsettling of Wells’s early masterpieces but also one of the most prophetic. Its questions about the ethics of the laboratory, the suffering of animals, and the reckless ambition of science anticipated debates over genetic engineering by a full century.
The book has never stopped provoking readers to question unchecked ambition and, through its alarm over a primal fear within our age, inspired generations of science fiction authors to create stories of their own with similar theming.
Now reprinted, dive into one of the greatest warnings ever written that’s only grown louder with time.
About the Author
- H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent, England, the son of a shopkeeper and a housekeeper. His early life was hard and uncertain, and as a boy he was apprenticed to a draper, a trade he detested and eventually escaped. Through a scholarship, he studied at the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, the great champion of Darwin. These years of study in evolutionary science would run through everything he later wrote.
After serving as a teacher and journalist, Wells turned to the “scientific romances” that made his name. In a remarkable burst during the 1890s, he produced The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). In a few short years, he had established the baseline for the majority of science fiction tropes that would be employed by writers the world over for the next century.
Wells wrote prolifically for the rest of his long life, ranging far beyond fiction into history, politics, and social prophecy, making him one of the most widely read authors in the world. He lived his days as a steadfast socialist and tireless advocate for a rational, unified future; he died in London in 1946. Wells would go on to be remembered alongside Jules Verne as a founding father of modern science fiction.
