26 September 2026
Between 1895 and 1901 H. G. Wells wrote five novels that set out most of the plots science fiction still runs on: a machine that travels in time, an island where a surgeon makes men out of animals, a scientist who makes himself invisible, Martians landing in Surrey, and two men who fly to the Moon. He called them scientific romances. Most people meet them as films, which keep the premise and drop what Wells actually did with it.
Start with The Invisible Man. It surprises people, because for its first half it is not a horror story at all. It is a village comedy. A stranger arrives at the Coach and Horses in Iping one February, bandaged to the eyes, and the book watches him from the other side of the bar: the landlady who wants to know what he does in there, the regulars with theories, the doctor who calls and leaves shaken. The science comes late and the menace later. The six chapters here are told as the landlady, Mrs Hall, and end on Whit Monday, when the village finally finds out what it has been serving.
Then The Island of Doctor Moreau, the same shape turned darker. Edward Prendick is shipwrecked, picked up by a schooner full of caged animals, and put ashore on an island where something behind a locked door is crying in pain. Wells wrote it in the middle of the vivisection controversy, and it still reads as an argument rather than a monster story. Its six chapters run from the dinghy to the night Moreau explains himself.
If those land and you want a long one, The First Men in the Moon runs to 68 chapters here: a bankrupt would-be playwright, a scientist who has made a substance that cancels gravity, and the civilisation the two of them find under the lunar surface. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are here too, as opening chapters so far.