Conceptual Fiction is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on major works of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism and alternate history. These books are celebrated in recognition that literary experimentation with ways of conceptualizing reality has been as important as experimentation with language in creating fiction of lasting value. Dismissing these books as genre or escapist works has created a blind-spot in literary studies that this feature aims, in some small part, to rectify.
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, The 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.
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