The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

At one point in The War of the Worlds, the protagonist runs into another survivor and they discuss plans for surviving underground as a human species in a world controlled by the Martians. It's a funny sort of post-apocalyptic novel where the apocalypse does not actually happen.

The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

I saw the Val Kilmer / Marlon Brando movie when it came out in 1996. The premise - that a reclusive scientist makes a race of beast men on a remote island - makes more sense in modern times with all the advances we've made in genetic engineering than it did 100 years prior when Wells wrote the novel. Wells' Moreau employs not genetic engineering but vivisection techniques: cutting up animals, grafting on parts, and physically transforming animals into man via surgery. This is a lot less realistic than genetic engineering, but it is a lot more horrifying.

The Time Machine

The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

I guess you can't write a novel about the future without making it some kind of political commentary, and The Time Machine is no exception. Wells' Time Traveler finds himself in the year 800000-something, and humanity has splintered, with a weak, stupid race living indolent communal lives above the earth while an underground race of cannibals toils for them. Wells paints this in a Marxist light:

At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.

He goes on to lament that the "human intellect ... had committed suicide." The novels takes the pessimistic view that man's progress "must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end."