The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Island of Dr Moreau is a novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1896. It is ranked among the classic novels of the English language and has been the inspiration for several films.

The book's reputation began with a hostile reception. Reviewers greeted it with protests and found it horrifying and blasphemous, having wanted more of the scientific possibility promised by Wells's first book, The Time Machine, rather than the misuse of that possibility. The plot places a castaway on an island ruled by a scientist whose work turns the setting into a place of concealment and pursuit. It followed The Time Machine, and part of the reviewers' disappointment was that it did not offer more of the same.

Wells's subject is evolution, divine creation and the tension between human nature and culture. Modern readers who are familiar with genetic engineering tend to find the novel's ethical questions recognisable rather than remote, which is why it is still catalogued alongside later science fiction rather than only as a Victorian curiosity. The objection was to the use of scientific possibility for terror rather than for wonder, which is a subject the novel took up deliberately rather than by accident.