There’s a certain satisfaction when science fiction describes something long before it becomes reality, whether it becomes reality incidentally, because the facts and physics happen to align (like with the Apollo program and From the Earth to the Moon), or because real world engineers and scientists are inspired by what science fiction authors imagine. When I read a recent paper about the development of an invisibility serum based on, of all things, the chemicals found in Cheetos and Doritos, I decided to go the other direction, and read the science fiction book that explored a similar invisibility serum over a hundred years ago.
Granted, that’s about where the similarities end, since the real world scientific development only renders surface tissues translucent, and there’s a bit of an orange tint that remains. This has immense potential applicability for allowing imaging and analysis of live-functioning tissues…and is nothing like the invisibility serum and associated contraption which feature in one of HG Wells’ most famous novels. The Invisible Man’s titular indiscernible individual is rendered truly invisible by his efforts, which result in all sorts of incidents, but this is no intriguing adventure novel. True to Wells’ form, The Invisible Man fits better in science horror than the science adventure of someone like Verne, or the hard science fiction their successors in Asimov, Heinlein, and others promulgated.
Unlike many of Wells’ novels, The Invisible Man is not presented in epistolary fashion, nor in first person, and there is no framing story. Instead, it begins with a third person omniscient narrator telling the reader a kind of mystery/detective story, about the strange man who comes to a small town one day. The reader is not directly told, at first, that this man is the invisible man, and the townspeople certainly do not contemplate that fact, although they quickly develop suspicions based on the invisible man’s strange behavior, and the tension inherent in the fact that the reader can assume this is the invisible man from the title of the book helps propel the first few chapters.
Once the invisible man is revealed, as it were (although he remains invisible – it is simply now known that there is an invisible man about), he embarks on a pell-mell, haphazard, unfocused reign of terror across the English countryside, during which he is almost always naked. This is alluded to a few times, and one at first thinks it an inevitable byproduct of invisibility, that the technique does not apply to nonliving tissues, and thus the invisible man cannot have invisible clothes, but, later in the novel, the invisible man reveals that one of his first experiments was on cloth, so one is left to wonder why he runs around naked for most of the book.
What is never explained adequately is why being invisible seems to deprive of the invisible man of his humanity. There is no property of the procedure elucidated, nor particular predilection revealed, that explains why a relatively ordinary person engaged in scientific research about light should, upon turning himself invisible, almost immediately fall into an amoral state of thievery, brutality, and generally taking advantage of his condition and bemoaning himself as a victim of unfortunate circumstance and cruel humanity. No definite reason, that is, because there is plenty of messaging reason: Wells is clearly, like with many of his stories, creating a warning about the dehumanizing capacities of technology and science.
Indeed, the strongest message of The Invisible Man seems to be that the man unseen will inevitably stop seeing himself as part of humanity and bound by the usual strictures of society. In this guise, the story may be more useful as a metaphor for those who are figuratively unseen in society and how they might respond to that condition than it is a specific warning against a specific technology or scientific pursuit. I would almost go so far as to say that The Invisible Man is not a science fiction story at all, except in the most general of senses in that it involves a speculative technology; rather, it should be shelved generally under speculative fiction.
Speaking of science fiction, we’ve written before about the divide between soft and hard science fiction. My recent rereading of Wells’ works clarifies for me another division, which perhaps goes all the way back to those grandfathers of the science fiction genre, HG Wells and Jules Verne. Verne’s stories tend to uplift science and its possibilities, while Wells’ tend to warn of its dangers. The former incorporates adventure, travel, and quest-type storylines, while the latter draws heavily from roots in the horror genre. These imprints are still visible today, with one branch of science fiction (stories like Star Trek, Rocheworld, Dragon’s Egg) embracing Verne’s tradition, and another, with which I tend not to engage, embracing the thriller/horror aspects of science fiction (think of the Alien franchise, for instance, or Jurassic Park (the books or the movies, although the movies lean further into horror/thriller than do the books)).
As you might guess, then, The Invisible Man is not one of my favorite science fiction classics, as topical as it was in this particular instance. It’s well written, and interesting for the different ways in which Wells writes it compared to most of his other novels, but I would have rather seen it fully embrace a mystery/detective novel format, without this unexplained descent into a kind of madness by the invisible man. It certainly captures the imagination, as evidenced by its continued fame and the numerous movie adaptations which have been made, but its speculative elements simply do not withstand a close, critical reading. A useful metaphor it might provide, but that doesn’t absolve the author of the need for plausible impossibility.
IGC Publishing 