I Feel (Un)Seen

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Let's dive right in as we start Chapter One of this new series, looking at H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man.  Published originally in Pearson's Weekly, a bi-weekly magazine in Britain that ran through 1939, Wells expanded into a novel that was published later in 1897.

The story of one Griffin, a scientist who accidentally discovers how to give his body the reflective property of air (as in light just passes through everything), it's a pretty gripping novel as he relates his misadventures because of the discovery.  He's slowly being driven mad by the consequences of the procedure, mostly because he cannot yet figure out how to reverse it and he's getting more and more frustrated.  Unable to work because of it, he is resorting to petty thievery to pay his hotel bills and for scientific equipment to reverse the curse he has inflicted on himself.  He recruits a former university colleague, Kemp, to help him but Kemp immediately alerts the authorities and the chase is on as Griffin becomes increasingly deranged and starts attacking people.  He eventually is chased down by a mob, beaten to death and his body slowly becomes visible after his death.

H. G. Wells is always a kind of curious character to me.  Widely regarded as one of the founders of modern science fiction* (the debate over whether Frankenstein is science fiction is silly to me; of course it is, but it's kind of an outlier for its time whereas Wells' work was the beginning of a slow wave).   Of course, his protagonists are always what I like to refer to as Serious White Men In Serious White Coats (and yes, that is Clint Eastwood above, in Revenge of the Creature from 1956). You get a lot of dialogue about science and light bending and hand-waving that Griffin should be blind (if your eyes can't absorb light, you can't see).  Then a whole burst of action at the end ending in a tragic death.  

This novel, in many ways, really does chart the course of science fiction up until the New Wave explosion started to open up the genre for more new and interesting things.   It's not that that was a bad thing, but science fiction did calcify for a while with the course charted by wells and Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell.  Very white, very male, homosexuals are icky and women are there to have things explained to them.**

All that said, this is a horribly entertaining read.  I can see why it's been adapted a billion times; it's an interesting philosophical conundrum:  if you had the freedom to do what you want without consequence, would you be good or evil?  (Poking around to write this, apparently the whole idea was inspired a bit by Plato's Republic, of all things. There is a legend about the Ring of Gyges, which would make you invisible, and Plato speculated if an ordinary, moral person would still become moral if they essentially had the power of god.  And yes, we all know where this going, I'm absolutely sure Toklien with his classics education read Republic and borrowed that idea for the One Ring and how it eventually drives everyone (except Sam Gamgee) power mad as it attempted to get back to its master.

OK, that's enough on The Invisible Man for this week!  In two weeks, tune back in as we watch and talk about the most famous film adaptation, the James Whale adaptation from 1933 starring Claude Rains and Gloria Stuart.

The Invisible Man is streaming on something called IndieFix, but you can rent or buy it at all the usual places.  Also, check your local library!  

*If you want a fun time, I cannot recommend enough The Dead Authors Podcast, where comedian Paul F. Tompkins would play Wells, interviewing dead authors who he had brought forward in time with the time machine he found in a church jumble sale.  He would once in a while go on a rant about how he actually invented science fiction, with making things up, unlike Jules Verne who just made things bigger.   It's an absolute delight.  Start with the 2-parter where Andy Daly plays L. Ron Hubbard and it's a high wire act of them volleying off each other, with Daly making absolutely nothing up as he runs through Hubbard's insane series of lies about himself.

**Also in recommendations, if you have any interest in the subject, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, which delves into the Golden Age of science fiction, explodes a bunch of myths and talks about how cloistered that era of science fiction was.