Some short novels are really just extended short stories and could have been wrapped up in half the pages. THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU could easily have been much longer. It is a tight little novel—every moment is devoted to tipping the scales, finding where we are on the line of humanity. At the very start our main character is dehumanized by being lost at sea…long enough to have abandoned reason. When found, he is nursed back to health by someone who is constantly losing his reason to alcohol. Even Dr. Moreau is never as savage as when imparting science to his creations. The narrator Prendick says toward the end of the novel, “An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.” This includes of course lying to oneself—Moreau has made this into an art form. The Man-Beasts that Moreau creates are not static either—there is a constant tug and pull between animal and man. They are created during an act of brutality and it is largely the fear of it’s return that keeps them human. Once that fear is gone, they revert to a form of their animal selves. Not a favorable critique of humanity. There is a point where Prendick (what can that name possibly mean?) drifts into a stasis with the Man-Beasts—for some weeks there is relative peace on the island. But any form of man will eventually fail to keep the peace. Much is written about H G Wells seeing the future—here forecasting genetic engineering. But really he was just a keen observer of his own times—extrapolating off the world around him. He saw the great acceleration of change at the end of the 19th century and realized it would not slow down. In the midst of a world becoming more mechanical, Wells writes here to ponder just what it is to be human. He discovers just how intangible that can be and how quickly it can elude us.