Doctor Moreau

I have recently finished HG Wells' Island of Doctor Moreau which I supplemented with a viewing of Island of Lost Souls. The latter is to-date the best cinematic rendition we've had from the book, and might structurally be better than the book itself - I might get to that.

Wells had - famously - burst out the gate with six books 1895-8, five of them SF including our topic the third. They were, I understand, all big sellers, if not at the time then certainly in their reprints. Wells may have felt guilt over his newfound wealth and fame, as he became a socialist. At least four of the SF books remain classics to this day including (I repeat myself) our topic. The man kept writing - which has proved a problem, because it doesn't look like his later projects (which were many) have fared so well. Although there remain apologists for, say, Kipps.

Moreau - I must report - presents "early work" problems to the modern reader. The book wasn't Wells' first; but he may have felt that he needed to put in as many ideas as he could, so he could force them upon a readership which he feared might abandon him. The movie, at a trim 70ish minutes, slashed out a good deal of Wells' philosophical ramblings, and dared have one of the Lost Souls feel an attraction to the character "Perkins" who is, uh, Prendick in the book. Wells could not dare this in late Victorian England, so postpones such "anthro" after Moreau's (sorry) end as remote-observation.

Wells was writing before genetics, and in anycase was not writing a genetic book. If you are looking for Jurassic Park, you should read Jurassic Park. Moreau at heart may or may not be a "Darwinist", but what he absolutely refuses is eugenics. Moreau believes instead in the medical biology: in Biblical terms, that you can change the leopard's spots, right now. Moreau, Londoner, has made excellent strides in this "endeavour", uplifting several species into humanoid form. He's got into their brains, too. And into their minds: to which end, he's instilled a cult.

Wells would become a(n) eugenicist. Wells, I suspect - darkly - didn't really believe that a man, even a genius of a man, could turn an actual @#$% puma into a catgirl waifu. (Indeed, we learn, here Moreau failed; although he does do fairly well with a dog.) Moreau is, Scott Alexander would say, Wells' steelman. Sake Of Argument.

No. Our text is a parable. Wells was more thinking of British idiots, of American Negroes, and of all the tribes for which London had (somehow) ended up responsible as of 1896. He thought that the British might indeed be able to dress up a Kenyan and make a passable Christian of him. But it would end up a shell of Christianity, and that the Kenyan would revert within months of British neglect. Christianity was a joke to Wells at the time - and in all the time G-d provided to him. If a bear could become like a man it would have to take place over the same millions of years as it took the apes.