Book Bearings
The Invisible Man
- 170 pages · about 3 hours
- First published 1897
- 563 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
The Invisible Man is an 1897 science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialised in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man to whom the title refers is Griffin, an optical scientist who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light. He carries out this procedure on himself and renders himself invisible, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. A practitioner of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction.
While its predecessors, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, were written using first-person narrators, Wells adopts a third-person objective point of view in The Invisible Man. The novel is considered influential, and helped establish Wells as the "father of science fiction".
Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Classics
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Science fiction
- Mystery
- People with mental illness
- Scientists
- Experiments
- Time travel
2 What to expect
A short Victorian science fiction novel that begins as a village mystery: a bandaged stranger takes a room at a country inn and demands to be left alone. Comedy among the villagers gives way to menace as the book asks what a man might do if no one could see him. It is quick and plainly told, in a detached third-person voice, and closer to horror than to adventure.
Good for readers who want: classic science fiction, a short read, and a story about power without consequences.
3 Read it free, right here
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Read it on the Internet Archive4 About H. G. Wells
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5 More by H. G. Wells
6 Similar books
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- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
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- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
- The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle