For a minute we stared at each other without speaking. Prendick notes without comment what must from the Victorian viewpoint be regarded as Montgomery’s unpropitious physiognomy:Ī youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist. In his convalescence, Prendick is attended by a physician named Montgomery who reminisces of his own days as a London medical student. Then he is rescued by another ship, the Ipecacuanha, captained by an abusive drunkard and mysteriously carrying a cargo of animals, including a puma. Prendick is an English gentleman, a dabbler who “had taken to Natural History as a relief from the dulness of comfortable independence.” When his ship, the Lady Vain, goes down in the Pacific, he finds himself in a dinghy with two other men who ironically end up killing themselves in their struggle for survival after one-with Prendick in agreement-proposes cannibalism. Human vanity is Wells’s theme, and nausea (implied by the schooner’s name, which refers to an emetic plant) his book’s dominant affect.Īfter the faux-documentary introduction, the novel is cast as Edward Prendick’s account of the year he spent while supposedly lost at sea. in a small open boat of which the name was illegible, but which is supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner Ipecacuanha. On January the Fifth, 1888-that is eleven months and four days after-my uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard the Lady Vain at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was picked up in latitude 5° 3′ S. We can tell this novel is allegorical from the names of the boats given in its ungainly second sentence: Given both romance’s immemorial investment in symbolism (think of the Grail quest) and Wells’s ultramodern desire to provide social commentary by extrapolation from present knowledge, it’s no surprise that science fiction is often allegorical.

The genre of prose fiction that predates the realist novel, romance is a narrative of enchantment and adventure Wells updates the romance-so that it can postdate the realist novel-by grounding its marvels in the scientific facts disclosed by the 19th century. Wells’s second “scientific romance” after The Time Machine.

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