![]() Plato's narrator, Glaucon, tells of a Lydian shepherd named Gyges who discovered a ring of invisibility in the bowels of the Earth. One of the earliest stories about invisibility appears near the start of Plato's Republic, a book that had impressed Wells in his youth. Wells may well have set out explicitly to update a myth. But the light that his invisible man casts on today's technological magic is much more revealing. It's tempting to suggest that, as with atomic bombs, Wells's imagination was anticipating what science would later realise. This is why The Invisible Man is so useful for interpreting the claims of modern physicists and engineers to be making what they call "invisibility cloaks": physical structures that try to hide from sight both themselves and what lies behind them. In other words, Wells wanted to turn myth into science, or at least something that would pass for it. I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible." "For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly," Wells wrote in 1934, "he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis … instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted. To judge from Wells's own account of his objectives, Conrad had divined them perfectly. ![]() ![]() That attitude is nowhere more evident than in the book that elicited Conrad's letter: The Invisible Man. It's a perceptive formula, capturing Wells's blend of wild invention and social realism: tea and cakes and time machines. Before their friendship soured, Conrad idolised him, and he wrote to rhapsodise the author of scientific romances as a "Realist of the Fantastic". HG Wells claimed in his autobiography that he and Joseph Conrad had "never really 'got on'", but you wouldn't suspect that from the gushing fan letter Conrad sent to Wells, eight years his junior but far more established as a writer, in 1897. ![]()
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