The Invisible Man : Penguin English Library

The Invisible Man : Penguin English Library
ISBN: 9780141389516
Publication Date: 29 November 2012

Depicting one man's descent into murderous brutality, The Invisible Man is a hugely influential and riveting exploration of science's power to corrupt.

With his face swaddled in bandages and his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, Griffin, a guest at an inn, is assumed to be an accident victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that makes him invisible, and is desperate to find the antidote. It is a struggle that will turn him into a monster.

About the Author

Herbert George Wells was a product of his time--the son of a servant, he studied the sciences at university and became both a popular writer and an influential socialist intellectual with a moderately scandalous list of affairs with women. Most of his science fiction dates from early in his career--in a few short years, he invented many of the obsessional tropes of the genre from The Time Machine to contact with hostile aliens (in The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon) to suspended animation (in The Sleeper Awakes) and the temporary uplift of animals to sapience (in The Island of Doctor Moreau). In almost all of these cases, he creates at once a satirical comment on some trend in contemporary society--class division, imperialism and so on--and a powerful poetic myth that transcends any immediate satiric content; when we think of the effete Eloi and subterranean Morlocks in The Time Machine, it is not just of aristocrats and proletarians that we think. Like Verne, he was occasionally fond of comic stereotypes--Wells almost singlehandedly crystallized the figure of the impractical comic scientist (in The First Men in the Moon), as he did that of the scientist so ruthless as to be on the edge of sanity (in The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Morea...