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A review by schnoebs13
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
4.0
After escaping a shipwreck, Edward Prendick finds himself the last survivor and rescued by a very unique man by the name of Montgomery. As he tries to gain his strength back, he finds himself left with his new company and many exotic animals on an island owned by a scientist he can’t seem to remember the name of. As the hours and days go by, he realizes that the situation he’s found himself in is not a common one and there’s a very distinct reason why the scientist seems so familiar to him. With the rustling of branches and unusual sounds around every corner, Prendick might not be able to survive his time on the island of Dr. Moreau.
This story started off really slow for me which made me worry a bit but with each chapter I got through, the experiences Prendick encountered became more and more extraordinary in the most bizarre of fashions and I needed to know what would happen next. I came into this somewhat blind to the story and learning about Moreau’s scientific experiments just completely threw me for a loop. The fascination of the whole experience just kept drawing me in and then learning about the laws and the origins of the creatures on the island helped me to really see how this story became a sci-fi classic. The concepts discussed in this book favor a lot more on the type of sci-fi I find myself enjoying and continues to incorporate the role of nature at the core of the story.
I’m really happy that I read the introduction my edition had by Alan Lightman after finishing the book. It helped put the story into a context that I didn't really make the connection with when I read it originally. Knowing now that it played off many of the conversations of the time surrounding Darwin’s theories of evolution, it makes this story even more horrific than it already is. I loved how it pushes on that connection we have with our evolutionary ancestors and touches on the ideas of what would happen if other animals became more human-like as their evolutionary process continued. It’s definitely still a very timely piece with our current scientific efforts surrounding genetic modification in a wide variety of fields from agriculture to human fertility. These conversations remind me of similar thoughts I had reading Jurassic Park which I’m sure took a lot of inspiration from this book.
Similarly, to Jurassic Park, having an outsider like Prendick as the narrator was definitely an interesting choice for the book because having that external view on what Dr. Moreau was doing provided an opportunity to see the horrors of the island without the rose-tinted glasses that Moreau and Montgomery had from their many years living there. I loved how we watched Prendick’s perspective change based on his health (whether it was physical due to starvation in the beginning and not being able to fully process what was happening on the island or his mental health at times where he just went numb and lived each day normally because his brain just couldn’t fully process how he got into that situation which made him act like everything was fine). Overall, I was surprised beyond belief that so much was packed into such a small story, and it has me wanting to look into the rest of the author’s work.
This story started off really slow for me which made me worry a bit but with each chapter I got through, the experiences Prendick encountered became more and more extraordinary in the most bizarre of fashions and I needed to know what would happen next. I came into this somewhat blind to the story and learning about Moreau’s scientific experiments just completely threw me for a loop. The fascination of the whole experience just kept drawing me in and then learning about the laws and the origins of the creatures on the island helped me to really see how this story became a sci-fi classic. The concepts discussed in this book favor a lot more on the type of sci-fi I find myself enjoying and continues to incorporate the role of nature at the core of the story.
I’m really happy that I read the introduction my edition had by Alan Lightman after finishing the book. It helped put the story into a context that I didn't really make the connection with when I read it originally. Knowing now that it played off many of the conversations of the time surrounding Darwin’s theories of evolution, it makes this story even more horrific than it already is. I loved how it pushes on that connection we have with our evolutionary ancestors and touches on the ideas of what would happen if other animals became more human-like as their evolutionary process continued. It’s definitely still a very timely piece with our current scientific efforts surrounding genetic modification in a wide variety of fields from agriculture to human fertility. These conversations remind me of similar thoughts I had reading Jurassic Park which I’m sure took a lot of inspiration from this book.
Similarly, to Jurassic Park, having an outsider like Prendick as the narrator was definitely an interesting choice for the book because having that external view on what Dr. Moreau was doing provided an opportunity to see the horrors of the island without the rose-tinted glasses that Moreau and Montgomery had from their many years living there. I loved how we watched Prendick’s perspective change based on his health (whether it was physical due to starvation in the beginning and not being able to fully process what was happening on the island or his mental health at times where he just went numb and lived each day normally because his brain just couldn’t fully process how he got into that situation which made him act like everything was fine). Overall, I was surprised beyond belief that so much was packed into such a small story, and it has me wanting to look into the rest of the author’s work.