The Island of Doctor Moreau popularized a major science-fiction trope.

The essay goes in some bizarre directions, positing that scientists might one day be able to create living mermaids and other mythological beings. He proposed that living subjects might be surgically and chemically “moulded and modified” into entirely different creatures. In an 1895 essay called “ The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” Wells seems to have argued that results like the ones his fictional doctor would later achieve were not purely the stuff of imagination. Wells didn’t think The Island of Doctor Moreau was particularly outlandish. London’s Saturday Review criticized its “cheap horrors” and accused Wells of seeking out “revolting details with the zeal of a sanitary inspector probing a crowded graveyard.” The Daily Chronicle clutched its pearls even more dramatically, fearing the book might cause “real injury” should it fall “into the hands of a child or a nervous woman.” The Daily Telegraph simply called it “a morbid aberration of scientific curiosity.” 3. Moreau was shockingly graphic for its time. With its references to vivisection and cannibalism, The Island of Dr. Moreau was considered lurid and gratuitously violent. Moreau was inspired by Scottish neurologist David Ferrier, the first scientist tried under the UK’s 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act for his experiments on the brains of dogs and monkeys. His tale of a scientist’s grotesque experiments to create human-animal hybrids was partly a response to public outcry over the practice of animal vivisection. Wells was both a student and teacher of evolutionary biology, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in zoology just six years before The Island of Dr. Moreau was inspired by an emotional debate over animal experimentation. Here are seven curious facts about Wells’s most unsettling work, which turns 125 this year.

While it wasn’t as well received as some of the author’s other “science romances,” the book has become an indelible part of our pop-culture landscape, inspiring multiple film adaptations, radio dramas, video game characters, and a “Treehouse of Horror” segment on The Simpsons (“ The Island of Dr.

Moreau spun the tale of a shipwrecked Englishman stranded on an island where a scientist is performing breathtakingly cruel surgeries on animals, hoping to transform them into humans. Sandwiched between 1895’s The Time Machine and 1897’s The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau-and forever changed the face of science fiction. In 1896, though, he published an uncharacteristically gruesome tale called The Island of Dr. Wells has been credited with predicting everything from the World Wide Web to the atomic bomb. As one of the formative voices of science fiction, H.G.

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