The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Island of Dr. Moreau: A Possibility, an allegorical science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, first published by Heinemann in April 1896, is the earliest novel with intelligent animal characters written for an adult readership. It presents the possibilities of the biological sciences to improve animals to a human level, at the same time that it warns against the dangers, both physical and moral, of reckless and cruel vivisection.

The novel is presented as the narrative of Edward Prendick, an Englishman whose ship sinks in the Pacific in 1887. He is rescued by a schooner taking supplies including caged animals, in the care of a man named Montgomery who has a strangely subhuman servant, to an unnamed island. There Prendick meets Montgomery's employer, a biologist named Moreau who has even stranger servants.

Prendick remembers sensational newspaper accounts of how Moreau was driven out of England after exposure of his vivisection experiments. He and Montgomery have continued and carried them further on the island, turning animals into intelligent "Beast Folk" (Prendick identifies Swine Men, Ape Men, Sloth Men, Leopard Men and many others, as well as animal combinations such as a wolf-bear) which he tries to control through a series of semi-religious "Laws" with a Beast-man called the "Sayer of the Law," a sort of high priest, and himself as a divinity ruling through his laboratory, known as the "House of Pain":

The forced evolution of the animals into humans is only temporary; the jungles of the island are full of partly-devolved Beast Folk that try to maintain their humanity. Eventually the carnivores among the Beast People revert to killing and eating meat ('tasting blood'). Once the Law is broken, all of the Beast Folk turn upon Moreau and Montgomery while Prendick escapes back out to sea. An exploration of the island by British sailors a few years later reveals only a few feral animals.

One of the enduring images from the novel is of Moreau and Montgomery maintaining their authority among the semi-wild Beast People with heavy whips. This was emphasized in the first motion picture adaptation of the novel, as The Island of Lost Souls in 1933, which featured Charles Laughton portraying Moreau as a whip-cracking sadist less interested in science than in torturing animals. A second movie, as The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1977, was so different that its script was novelized separately by Joseph Silva(Ron Goulart). This version advances the year to 1914, replaces Prendick with Andrew Braddock, and renames the Beast Folk as humanimals. Burt Lancaster played Dr. Paul Moreau closer to the intellectual but amoral scientist of Wells' novel, but has him experimenting on Braddock to turn him into a humanimal. A third movie adaptation, in 1996 with Marlon Brando playing the doctor as a grotesque mad scientist, updates the plot with DNA injections replacing vivisection.

The Island of Dr. Moreau has served as an inspiration to many works of fiction, especially in science fiction where several authors have written unauthorized pastiches or sequels such as Moreau's Other Island, by Brian W. Aldiss (1980), and Dr. Franklin's Island, by Ann Halam (2001), or the novels of S. Andrew Swann who calls his anthropomorphic characters "moreaus" as homage. In many modern roleplaying games, such as d20 Modern, moreaus are used again to name species of genetically engineered anthro beasts.