Usually when we imagine becoming invisible it's a pretty innocuous fantasy—mostly harmless voyeurism or prank-playing. H.G. Wells knew, however, that should invisibility ever become possible for humans it would immediately turn out to their detriment, resulting in chaos and violence as it does in his bizarre science fiction parable The Invisible Man. A man invisible to societyand himself can only become a monster of the worst, most frightening kind.
That his transformationcomes through great physical pain represents the danger of "mad science" as well as the lengths man will go to escape the limits of nature. The wintry atmosphere of the novel evokes an almost post-apocalyptic English countryside in which the introduction of such an aberration as a man who can't be seen heralds the possibility of any terror, any act of lawlessness. And the invisible mandoessuffer his own apocalypse, as hisalteration and evil intentions have ravaged his mind to the point of insanity, a point beyond which there is only anarchy and disorder.
This isn't a fun adventure story. Wellsdidn't write mere entertainments because his great concern was preserving the human race and issuing warnings, not sedatingpeople with simple stories of science gone wrong that wrap up neatly and leave us satisfied. The Invisible Man does not leave the careful reader satisfied, ending with the threat that what has just been read could (and in all honesty, probably will) happen again.
The proper response isn't the death of science. The proper response is sciencetempered bymorality, science used to serve humanity. Wells' understanding of human nature and its capacity for evil, as well as the absurdity of claiming scientific progress is amoral, make his intelligent novel all the more poignant. Not a book to be read late at night, this should nevertheless be required reading for every adult living in the modern age.
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