The Island of Doctor Moreau

A shipwreck in the South Seas takes us to a palm-tree paradise where a mad sciencist -- the depraved Dr. Moreau -- conducts vile experiments, unspeakable animal experiments with hideous, humanlike results. Edward Prendick, an Englishman whose misfortunes bring him to the island, is witness to the Beast Folk's strange civilization and their eventual terrifying regression. It's the stuff of high adventure; it's also a tale about evolution -- and a satire that plays deliberately in the vein Jonathan Swift mined in Gulliver's Travels. It's also a bloody tale of horror. Wells himself was frank about it: "The Island of Dr. Moreau is an exercise in youthful blasphemy. Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, and I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation." While gene-splicing and bioengineering are common practices today, readers are still astounded at Wells's haunting vision and the ethical questions he raised a century before our time.

A shipwreck in the South Seas, a palm-tree paradise where a mad doctor conducts vile experiments, animals that become human and then "beastly" in ways they never were before--it's the stuff of high adventure. It's also a parable about Darwinian theory, a social satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels), and a bloody tale of horror. Or, as H. G. Wells himself wrote about this story, "The Island of Dr. Moreau is an exercise in youthful blasphemy. Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, and I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation." This colorful tale by the author of The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds lit a firestorm of controversy at the time of its publication in 1896.