ople of the town of Iping did not really want an explanation; they wanted the invisible man dead. After the people chased him out of town, he became crazy enough to decide to kill. The Invisible Man was the person most responsible for his fate because he did not think of the consequences of his actions. Society never gave him a chance because he was something they could not understand. This novel stresses the theme we see throughout H.G. Wells: it is dangerous to be different, to experiment with things that other people do not understand and are therefore afraid of. If you are going to take risks Wells warns, be sure you think very carefully about the consequences, which may include being laughed at and possibly persecuted. Reading H.G. Wells in the 21st century, it is important to remember that Wells was writing by lamp light in the beginning of the 20th century. Many of the things he himself considered fantasy and impossible, we now consider possible. In the war of the worlds he fantasizes about a form of life resembling human life existing on Mars and Venus. Today our space probes have been able to approach close enough to these planets to take photographs. Now we are seriously considering the possibility that life, as we know it, may once have existed on these planets and scientific research continues to explore these possibilities. What Wells considered fantasy we now consider possibility. Another theme in Wells writing is that we can never feel completely secure. We can never know whether good or evil may come upon us suddenly out of space. This is particularly true in the age of long-range missiles when a weapon launched from one country can destroy life in another. Medical scientists carefully examined the astronauts who walked on the moon to be sure they were not bringing deadly viruses back to earth. This shows that Wells was a prophetic writer. Wells describes laboratories which analyze unknown elements in muc...
