The Invisible Man

On a snowy February day, a stranger wrapped in bandages, with dark goggles and a false nose, takes a room at the inn of a Sussex village and refuses to show his face. The curious villagers soon learn the truth: he is Griffin, a brilliant and bitter young scientist who has discovered how to make his body invisible, and cannot become visible again. Invisibility brings him not power but cold, hunger and fear, since even his food shows inside him, and his anger grows until he asks a former fellow student, Dr Kemp, to help him begin a 'Reign of Terror'.

H. G. Wells published the novel in 1897, with the subtitle 'A Grotesque Romance', and it mixes village comedy with real horror. The 1933 film with Claude Rains made Griffin famous. Wells's other early 'scientific romances' include The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.

He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.