Barnes & Noble, 1994, $9.95, ISBN 0-7607-1576-9, 515 pgs., trade paperback

I received this four-novel compilation book as a birthday present, in part because I had seen the 2002 movie, The Time Machine, and in part because I kept muttering that the movie didn't seem reflective of my memory of the book. Sadly, I had read it all too many years ago, and had not remembered it. So this was presented to me as a way of soothing my curiosity, or perhaps stifling my over-analyzing of plot lines.

Wells wrote these four novels between 1894-1898 at a time when science seemed limitless and our capacity to tinker with man and machine -- for the better -- seemed unbounded. Yet his books temper the enthusiasm of invention with a darkness, where advances for the good can be adapted by the bad.

The Time Machine

The 2002 movie, The Time Machine, was wonderful for the first half, and then collapsed into a Z-class remake of the remake of Planet of the Apes. What rubbish! I can't tell you how disappointing it was to go from enjoying the movie to being utterly bored.

The novel, on the other hand, proved to have held its age. There's not much of a lead up to the main point -- the Time Traveler hops into a machine and travels 812,701 years into the future. The appeal is in the imagination of what he finds. There's a bit of adventure here, as he goes exploring the environs of future London, runs into the Morlocks, and breaks free to take the machine millions of years into the future...and then comes back.

Now if you saw the 2002 movie, you realize there is no dead fiancé, although I thought that looping character of a movie plot point (similar to james Hogan's Thrice Upon a Time) a good beginning in terms of motivation. There are also no cliffside dwellings and no evil telepathic geniuses controlling the buffed-up, ape-like Morlocks. And these bad apes of the future, far from being super-strong, quick, and daylight hunters who tunnel instantaneously in the wretched movie, are weak subterranean creatures who are allergic to light, quite mortal versus iron bars, and leaderless.

Thumbs up for the book. Thumbs down for the 2002 movie. Of course, now all I have to do is find the movie from the 1960s-70s and see how that was done.

The Island of Dr. Moreau

I seem to recall a movie with Michael York and Burt Lancaster made from the novel, but that was a long, long time ago, and so I can't rant about the screenplay. I can rant about the novel, and this rant is positive.

Edward Prendick's ship breaks up and he soon finds himself alone in a dingy slowly dying of thirst and exposure somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A ship happens by and rescues him. Montgomery, Dr. Moreau's assistant, is returning to the island, laden with all sorts of animals.

A quarrel finds Prendick at odds with the drunken captain, who tosses him overboard at the island. Moreau and Montgomery take pity and take him ashore, where Prendick soon discovers the results of Moreau's experiments at grafting tissue onto animals to make semi-humans.

So begins the adventure of escape and ultimately survival as the grafted natives not only get restless, they begin to revert to animal instincts. Wells' descriptions of the de-evolution of man is as astounding as his evolution of beasts.

The Invisible Man

"Claude Rains was the Invisible Man." So goes a lyric form the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and sure enough, I dimly remember that film too, from the 1950s I believe, although often movies explored invisibility. It sure is a testament to HG Wells' stories that so many of them have been turned into movies.

In any case, a stranger arrives at an inn in a remote part of England, and promptly shuts himself up in a room for months tinkering with chemicals. The stranger is Griffin, a young scientist who figured out how to alter the light spectrum of the human body to become invisible to the naked eye, and now has to figure out how to re-alter it.

As he runs out of cash, he starts to run, with an entire village in hot pursuit. Invisibility has its moments and ultimately he finds himself at a colleague's office, pouring out the story of how he came to be invisible.

Again, it is human frailty exposed during a mishap of ambitious science. And it is a riveting story as well.

War of the Worlds

Orson Wells aside, you should know the original is set in England, not New Jersey. Astronomers notice puffs from Mars, and after a time, Martians start to land outside London.

Martians love to eat humans, spread destruction with their Heat Ray, and use black poison gas to kill off any troublesome humans-like soldiers.

As England mobilizes infantry, cavalry, and artillery--remember, this was written in 1898 before airplanes and tanks--the battle for Earth begins. Our hero mostly runs and hides, for he is the observer, not the fighter.

As you know, these blood-sucking Martians succumb to bacteria and die after devastating London and its environs. Even the choking red weeds brought from Mars fall to some blight. It's a clear victory: Microbes 1, Martians 0. Of course, Wells never saw English multiflora rose bloom in New Jersey and start to choke out my lawn, but how different the story would be if red weed choked out terrestrial flora.

It's a fitting reminder that for all the technology, sometimes it's the simplest things that fell ambitious science.

Overall

Reading these four stories proved an absolute hoot and refreshed my memory about things Victorian scientific. I admit, I am a fan of the extrapolated Victorian science movies where villains are mad scientists and heroes are sane scientists. Wells, and Jules Verne for that matter, pioneered the genre, and we should read or re-read their efforts. It's a blast seeing what authors over 100 years ago thought about science--on the one hand trying to peer ahead to the future, and yet on the other restrained by their age. Wells provides a wonderful journey of the imagination.

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