La otra isla del doctor Moreau

by Brian W. Aldiss, Rubén Masera (Translator)

En los primeros momentos de la guerra, una cápsula del espacio es saboteada mientras regresa de un viaje a la Luna. El una persona muerta y otras tres a la deriva en una balsa en medio del Pacífico. Sólo uno de ellos sobrevive y alcanza a ver los acantilados de una isla dominada por una letra M. La apariencia de los habitantes de esta isla sorprende vivamente al náufrago, aunque humanos, hay en ellos algo enigmáticamente bestial. El genio siniestro responsable de estos híbridos es Mortimer Dart, una víctima de la talidomida fascinada por las deformidades humanas y que ha llevado a cabo una serie de experimentos que duplican los del legendario doctor Moreau de H.G. Wells. Brian Aldiss rinde un sentido homenaje a Wells en la que constituye una de sus obras mayores.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Ebooks

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Pseudonyms: Jael Cracken, Peter Pica, John Runciman, C.C. Shackleton, Arch Mendicant, & "Doc" Peristyle.

Brian Wilson Aldiss was one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999.
Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017, just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.

Brian W. Aldiss Group on Good Reads

Reviews

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Calvert Roberts, Subsecretario del Gobierno de Estados Unidos, naufraga tras caer su nave espacial al océano. Afortunadamente, es recogido en una lancha y llevado hasta la llamada Isla de Moreau. En dicha isla gobierna con mano de hierro el llamado Amo, de nombre Mortimer Dart, que realiza experimentos al modo del mítico personaje creado por H.G. Wells, que a su vez, como se deja entrever, estuvo inspirado por un tal McMoreau. A partir de aquí, asistiremos a las aventuras y desventuras de Roberts para intentar salir de la isla, conociendo de paso todo el sistema creado por Dart. Resulta interesante el trasfondo de la novela, donde se deja entrever que se está manteniendo una guerra a nivel global.

‘La otra isla del doctor Moreau’ (Moreau’s Other Island, 1980), del británico Brian W. Aldiss, más que una secuela es un remake de la famosa novela de Wells, un actualización escrita desde los años ochenta por uno de los abanderados de la New Wave. Si bien resulta poco novedosa, es una novela entretenida.

[Stephen Theaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good sequel to the novel by Wells, in which the protagonist has heard of the first book, and discovers that it was based on true facts. It features some great lines, such as "Warfare...the perfect human excuse to exercise power, personal power as well as national" (p.68) and "Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down" (p.63). Readers today may be shocked by some of the sexual content.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like "Frankenstein Unbound", I think I need to read the novel that it plays on ("The Island of Dr Moreau" by H.G.Wells) to get the most out of this.

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I rarely go into a review without having a good idea of the structure of my critique, but... well, I suppose today will be a rarity. I really haven't the foggiest idea how to structure my thoughts on this short novel, which is kind of weird because, well, it's not *that* weird of a book. I mean, it's distinctly more bizarre than your average trip into a Timescape mass market paperback (if you're reading the Americanized variant *An Island Called Moreau* and not the original British title *Moreau's Other Island*, which makes even less since than the North American name), but I've read weirder. I've also read better; this book starts off with a really solid base but eventually finds itself wandering onto some distasteful tracks that authors usually know not to find themselves stumbling onto in the middle of a book; let's break it down so you have a better idea of what's concerning to me...

*An Island Called Moreau* is a blatant sequel to H. G. Wells' classic *The Island of Doctor Moreau*, an 1890s work about a mad scientist using vivisection on a remote Pacific island to raise animals to human-like levels of awareness before all Hell breaks lose on the island, people die and the uplifted animals forget the more wholesome elements of the human spirit. Aldiss' book also starts in the Pacific, only this time it's with a man named Calvert Roberts, Undesecretary of State for a United States now embroiled in a world war (this was technically written in the Cold War, after all), stranded alone in the Pacific after a dolphin augmented with suicide bombs (unbeknownst to the poor thing) kills his fellow strandees. Eventually he finds himself washed up on a strange island with strange, almost brutish natives flickering in the corner of his eyes - he finds himself rescued by a man named Maastricht, who works with the brutish natives and has one named George lead him to HQ, where "The Master" lives. The Master looks like a giant robot at first, but once he has a tea-side chat with Roberts we realize he's really disabled - he's limbless because his mother took thalidomide when pregnant with him. Now he (also known as Mortimer Dart) runs strange experiments on this island, which is apparently the same one that Dr. Moreau, apparently a real person that Wells was inspired to write about after hearing his story, performed his experiments on. Roberts demands that Dart send word that he's alive to the government, but Dart won't do it; he doesn't have word that Roberts is really who he says he is, and nothing that could incriminate him can leave this island. Dejected, Roberts spends the next day with Maastricht at the lagoon after he orders hybrids to work, saying that you need to keep them busy or they'll rebel, which is kind of like Marxism. While swimming Roberts also meets the seal-people, who are actually flippered thalidomide babies like Dart himself. They're mischievous. When Dart still refuses to send word, Roberts starts yelling, and Dart has him locked up...

Roberts is released when Maastricht has trouble controlling the hybrids because they're worried that Dart killed Roberts. He lets him out and brings him to the workers to prove he's okay, but then foreman Maastricht accidentally crashes the crane he operates drunkenly into the lagoon. Roberts dives down to try and help him and gets others like the mischievous Foxy to help, but by the time they rescue him, he's dead. His carbine rifle is still down there, though, and Dart wants Roberts to go down and get it so the seals (and then the rest of the uplifted animals) don't. Roberts refuses, even when Dart offers up his "assistant" Heather, who stripteases for him. They have a funeral for Maastricht, but during it Foxy - who got the seals to get the carbine for him - shoots up the place and causes mass chaos. Dart survives in his tank and Roberts' dog-man friend Bernie takes Roberts to Warren, the other man who lives on the island. Warren's not happy to see him, but we do hear his story; he was here with Dart from the beginning but thinks he's crazy and inhumane so he lives separately and receives submarine equipment and munitions fillups every so often. One of those days is coming, and Dart wants back on one of the submarines, but that night the Beast People - more or less led by Foxy - attack. They kill Warren, but Roberts escapes by jumping off a steep cliff into the ocean. It should've killed him, but the seal people rescue him and they live in an orgy bliss with the seal peoples' undisabled daughter (a five-year old taking part in their orgy) before he kind of snaps out of it and goes back to HQ, where Dart and Heather have things locked down against continued animal assault. They assume his allegiance and he uses it to sneak a call for assistance out. Dart isn't happy - although he's glad he's only a foolish politician and not a real spy - and tells him about how Roberts' own department funds his operation. He doesn't believe it, but it's proven to him, and Dart shows the reason he's funded - the Standby Replacement Subrace, a group of weird dwarfish humans he's engineered. They lock him up again and he uses the Beast People to escape before the submarine makes landfall and Marines extract Dart and the weird SRSRs from all the fire. The allies who Robert called pick him and the seal people up and the island goes back to Beastery...

On some levels, this really is *The Island of Doctor Moreau* updated for the twenty-first century. First of all, it is very 80s - the prose has that smooth 80s action-feel that comes with the territory; there's a war between Russia and the United States in the background; and it's got some needless horny scenes (like the pedophilic sealpeople orgy. But it still doesn't stray too far from its urtext; the character comparisons abound. You've got an obvious Moreau; a dog-man who befriends the main character; Foxy is place of the Leopard Man; and more. There are similar themes, too, albeit grander (we'll get to that in a moment), so it seems kind of... well, I'm not completely sure why Aldiss had to write this book. It doesn't improve on much or really shift any paradigms as it pertains to Wells' original work. Now, it is well written - it's smooth and engaging at the start of the first chapter and never really stops with its effortless blend of physicality and internal dialogue with some fine quotes and even a little nice turn of phrase - but the plot is just kind of... bizarre. It stays very close for the original except for when it really shouldn't. It's... weird. It almost feels like it needed a lot more pages to say what it was really trying to say, and I'll explain that after I theorize about exactly what it's trying to say.

The original *Moreau* was a thematic work; sure, it was about uplifted animals, but it was really about Wells' whims about the thin veneer that keeps society together and what little force it would take to break that seal. This book is also thematic, and it keeps some of those same themes - like the sometimes poorly-disguised illusion of civilization - while trying to add larger themes about governmental morality and religion into the mix. Having a protagonist who's an idealistic politician is a bit more of a moral viewpoint than Prendrick's, and this idealism is challenged not just by the cruelty that Dart was inflicting but by his being funded by the very government that Roberts works as an idealist for. The most personal sense of horror Aldiss put into this book was the individualized paradigm shift when Roberts feels his world shifting under his feet, and it's actually starts being effective. But before it can sink in, Aldiss charges forward with this weird SRSR thing that seems crammed into the book and gets on with the action-packed extraction. There's also a strand of religious thematicism with Roberts' belief in a God being something even he can't explain and that belief being washed away by the events of the novel, but ultimately the resolution to that feels even less baked than those aimed at government and morality. But those still felt forced, with each twist of intrigue that Aldiss threw in there - like Dart's assistant Heather being a government agent to keep him going that even Dart himself isn't aware of - making me wonder, "what does this really add to things?" Not much, really, so I would've liked to see this book have a sequel or just another 150 pages that grapples with what happens after Roberts and Dart get off the island - if Roberts really does fight back against this installation, what moral waves crash against each other and onto shore? I think it could be really interesting, and I would've liked to see that, because as it stands... this book ain't great. The themes are intriguing, but ultimately forgettable as the plot moves along without ever resolving anything to satisfaction.

I mean, this really isn't a bad book - I'd still say that I like it! While the scaffolding around its morals are shaky, it hooked me at the start; the whole suicide-bomber dolphin was an evocative opening scene, betrayed a level of biotechnology which set the stage for the rest of the book, and proved to be pretty effective. The plotting was pretty solid and well-paced for the first half. I'm not even really mad at the ending - I think it could've used some elaboration to make the forced themes of government worth the deviation from the classic story (this book still doesn't stand fully well on its own). But there are some quirks I'd like to mention here. There's a bit of a "framing" narrative at the beginning and end of this book about the ocean being ever-lasting and watching the actions of man or some crap like that, which wasn't bad, but definitely felt out of place. And of course there's the one scene that... I mean, I have no reason for its existence besides *maybe* being a statement about the disintegration of morals when civilization starts falling apart, but that have to show itself as... pedophilia? No. But... I mean, , no, I got nothing. That whole sequence is what really yanked this book of the rails for me. Still, it's an interesting enough book that could've been something special. I wonder how much Aldiss did for *Frankenstein Unbound* and *Dracula Unbound* now - maybe I'll read them next Halloween. For now, I'm left to be thankful I read the first half of this book and... scratch my head at the second.

I enjoyed this book too much for a 6/10, so I'm giving it a 6.5/10. It's uneven, but Aldiss never loses his voice, and I do think that it's a shame this has such a low rating on Goodreads compared to so many worse-written books when its literary construction (if not its thematic) is not that bad. But, I will never understand Goodreaders. Or why this book did some of the things it did. I've got some other obscure Aldiss works I could read whenever, so I'm sure I'll return to him soon - until I do, good luck out there, and here's hoping that the themes of the next recursive SF novel you read can be a little more coherent than these...

[Leila Anani · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this is supposed to be a sequel to Well's Island of Doctor Moreau, it feels far more like a reworking of the original story. Its set in the not too distant future (1996), during a third world war. Our hero Calvert Mardle Roberts is a politician who's space shuttle gets shot down returning from a conference on the moon. He lands on Moreau's Island - Moreau's successor is an embittered thalidomide victim Mortimer Dart - As well as creating cyborg limbs for himself has been busy experimenting with both vivisection and drugs in utero to create a bizarre army of freaks for the war effort.

I loved some of the ideas in this, thalidomide and the idea of using drugs to produce freaks is a brilliant 'modern' twist, however not nearly enough is made of this. The idea is put to far better use in the novel Geek Love by Katherine Dunn where a mother uses drugs during pregnancy to produce circus freaks. Here its rather overshadowed by everything else.

I didn't think enough time was spent on the current situation either. I got confused over the moon, for a while I thought this was actually set on the moon - but I think his shuttle crashed on a return journey. But not nearly enough time is devoted to the war-torn future. Are there colonies on the moon - how far has man expanded into space, what are the world powers? Its all disappointingly sketchy.

Some of the things this does dwell on feel a bit odd as well. In particular Cal's idyll with the seal people. Now not all Moreau's creations are bad. There's a family of seal people who rescue Cal and he lives with them for a bit and embraces their commune of free love. There are several men and their queen Lorta and they have a human child, Satsu aged around 4 or 5. Satsu gleefully joins in all the 'love games of the adults' - and its clear Cal has sex with his "little sucky Satsu" - 'I did not even know that such young children could experience orgasm. But so it was.' This just feels all shades of wrong and other than its obvious shock value, I really can't fathom the point of its inclusion in this.

While I loved some of the new twists, there's not nearly enough originality and this really become a rehash of Moreau, which is fine as far as it goes, but the original packed far more punch and this feels like a lesser version. Still its quite fun, but not nearly as exciting as I hoped and the seal interlude made me quite uncomfortable.

[Steve R · Rating 2 out of 5]

A 1981 sequel/homage to the original Island of Doctor Moreau of H.G. Wells, all I can remember of this novel is that it, like its progenitor, did little to interest me. In fact, they both made me feel kind of creeped out: I mean, why would someone want to graft different parts of different animals together, anyway? Supposedly set in an updated world with modern medical issues addressed, Aldiss always tried something new, even when paying suitable respect to his science fiction predecessors.

[Phillip · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know what to say about this one. This bizarre, often well-written but certainly strange novel, “inspired” by H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, has me scratching my head. The author, Brian Aldiss, properly gives credit to Wells for inspiring his novel, which I appreciated, but I have to admit I wish he had done more justice in his futuristic rehash of the original. Here, a Prendick-like character, Calvert Roberts, is shipwrecked on the island, and quickly met by a Montgomery-like character, Hans Maastricht, who sends him off to the village where he is met by the Moreau-like character, Mortimer Dart. When Dart first appears, he looks like a robot, and is fitted with all sorts of bizarre machinery that makes him intimidating and even lethal, and of course he carries and uses not only a whip, but a gun. Later we discover that Dart is actually crippled—he was born with deformities that left him without any proper arms and legs, so he built a truly clever, mechanically futuristic suit of armor that he uses to move around in. The author never truly describes how this machinery functions, so your guess is as good as mine.

While on the island, the protagonist, Calvert Roberts, meets the expected beast people, and he describes them much like Prendick in the original “Moreau.” He even meets his “dog-man” whom he calls Bernie, who comes to his aid from time to time. Roberts is evidently a politician who has been on Mars negotiating a peace treaty on earth, and his spaceship crashed while on its way back to Washington. That’s when the author lost me. That’s when I regretted picking up this novel, and truly wished I didn’t have this annoying obsession with completing every novel I begin (unless they are truly awful) even if I don’t enjoy what I’m reading. So, I kept reading. The story is fairly predictable but has its moments along the way. Roberts escapes certain death once one of the beast-people gets his hands on a carbine rifle and attempts to kill Dart and all the other four-limbed creatures on the island. Foxy, our rifleman, becomes the leader of the beast-people, of course, and intends to give Dart his due for of course all the pain and horror he has caused in his laboratory. Dart is evidently working for the government, attempting to create a new strain of human, resistant to radioactivity and nuclear war, unbeknownst to Roberts, our ignorant politician. I really didn’t care for this character. He thinks he’s brilliant, but a brilliant man wouldn’t tell the bad guy that he intends to turn him in and get him arrested once he (Roberts) gets off the island. What is Dart going to do now, just let him go? Stupid. A smart man would play along, befriend Dart, play his game and wait for his moment to betray and attack. Thus, this part of the story really collapses, which creates a snowball effect on the whole narrative.

Okay, I’m done with the plot summary. The writing isn’t bad, and Roberts makes some interesting observations from time to time. The female characters are rather stupid and unnecessary. At one point Roberts meets some “seal people” who rescue him from certain drowning, and he engages in a three-day orgy with them, including evidently a young girl among them who is clearly less than ten years old, which means Roberts, our self-righteous politician, is a pedophile, and how the author thought this was appropriate in any way is beyond me. He makes very clear that this young girl gives him oral sex, repeatedly, and he comments on how he wasn’t aware that little kids could have orgasms. This section of the book seems oddly out of place since no sexual reference occurs anywhere else in the novel. I’m still scratching my head. Anyhow, the ending feels rushed and is utterly unsatisfying. Unlike Wells, who provides a solid resolution in his epilogue and gives us something truly interesting to ponder, Aldiss gives us nothing but a bunch of odd, scientifically philosophical gobbledygook that will take me some time to digest—assuming I care enough to do so. I’d rather watch paint dry. Thus, do I recommend this? No, not really. I was sucked in by the title, I admit. I was teaching the original to my class, came across this book somehow, and got suckered into anything that had anything to do with Moreau. I wouldn’t read this again, unless I was in prison and it was the only book available, and even then I’d have to be really desperate. Oh well...this happens sometimes with literature...you take the good with the bad. Needless to say, this was the latter.

[Kevin Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Second Generation of Monsters

Brian W. Aldiss’s “An Island Called Moreau” is, predictably, a distant sequel to H. G. Wells’s seminal “The Island of Dr. Moreau”. In Aldiss’s grim followup, set vaguely in the near future, humanity stands on the brink of worldwide nuclear holocaust. Calvert Roberts, a State Department official, crashes into the South Pacific and washes up on an island populated by deformed, animalistic people with rudimentary language skills, driven with whips by brutish human masters. He finds that it is the legendary island of Wells’s Dr. Moreau, and has been taken over by a deformed megalomaniac who is continuing the species-shifting experiments described by Wells, using modern genetic technologies.

Roberts comes into conflict with the crazed researcher, Dart (a nod to Raymond Dart, discoverer of early hominid fossils?), and is threatened variously by him, his equally sketchy assistants, and the crowd of humanized animals that throng the island and seem always ready to break into a vicious mob. He establishes relationships with some of the island residents, which illuminate what kind of people are present and what kind of lives they lead. He demands to have the mainland contacted and informed of his whereabouts, but is kept prisoner while the uneasy balance of power on the island is distorted by his presence. As he lives among them, he finds his own values challenged and ineluctably distorting: he gradually learns that some ideals are not operative in that environment, and some others, including an unexpected sexual abandon to the point of pedophilia, become more acceptable than expected. Finally the situation comes to a head, with consequences for all.

Aldiss throws in a few nods to Wells: the animalistic natures of the experimental creatures on the island, the god complex of their scientific creator, driven by his own internal obsessions and resentments, the grandiose improvement project that makes them all victims, and the presence of a judgmental outsider who forces the doctor to try to justify his horrifying scheme. There is even an echo of Dr. Moreau’s brainwashing creed for the animals (“Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law”); Dart, himself deformed by Thalidomide, teaches his creatures “Four Legs Long/Wrong kind of song . . .”. But what is interesting in any project of this kind is trying to understand why it was undertaken, which means identifying the ways the book changes the original story, and asking what they mean.

The new version centers on genetics rather than crude surgery to remake the animals, but that doesn’t seem to be the main point. It also ties the biomedical horror on the island to the impending nuclear/chemical horror in the larger world, but the only clear statement in that regard is Dart’s argument that in times of crisis normal moral rules don’t apply. The problems or limits of this claim are not addressed. The involvement of the government in Dart’s project raises questions of abuse of authority, and secrecy, but these do not play out to any conclusion. There is a very minor subplot that indicates Dart’s bizarre experiments are aimed at finding a way to survive the apocalypse that is expected, but this alsois not explored deeply. For that matter, with a few exceptions we are never given a very detailed look at most of the creatures on the island, why they were made and how, and what they are like other than in crude appearance. In the end the book raises many rich questions, but spends little time on any of them.

In short, this book reads like a rather bizarre horror/adventure story rather than a searching look at science and its impact on humans. That is not necessarily a bad thing if that is the author’s intention, but it invites unfortunate comparisons to its source material. A book about the legacy of Dr. Moreau ought to have a weighty moral core; this one seems to be more in the Thrilling Tales mode, and thus comes off feeling like a bit of a wasted opportunity. Not a bad story, though.

[blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

I told myself I would read the books (magazines, actually) that had accumulated in my latest trip from A-Z, before starting back on "A" again, at least until I had reshelved the last set.

I lied.

And "A" brings me back around to Aldiss, that morose mofo who seems to see gloomy apocalypse around every corner, and who has revisited H.G. Wells unpleasant tale The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Aldiss can write and plot, though, so the book is a good read, and a reasonable update (for 1981) of Wells' story, which is considered here to be based on a real person. The update involves a grownup Thalidomide baby who—actually, sort of surprisingly, isn't working on a way to fix himself, but instead coming up with newer, better teratogenic (mutating fetuses) chemicals.

Eh. It's pretty unpleasant, much like the original—though at least it lacks the torture of the original—but additionally because of general misanthropy, which seems to be a recurring theme in Aldiss' books. And the main character is an officious jerk of the first water whose every action brings death and destruction to the island, and yet who feels little to no responsibility for any of it.

The reveals will probably not shock you.

Because its 1980 and Dr. Moreau, you just know bestiality is going to come into this (and it does), but Aldiss goes out of his way to introduce pedophilia as well. I mean, straight-up pedophilia, not even couched in bestiality.

When I see stuff like this in SF, I tend to blame Heinlein, who achieved some kind of mainstream relevance with the aggressive promiscuity in Stranger in a Strange Land—and once you've done all the variants of sex with adults possible (including adult children) where's left to go?

I don't know if it holds water as a theory, especially here. Aldiss creates a world of mutants, where the mutants are very unsuccessful at having children, generally, and then creates a fully human child from mutant offspring, and has this four-year-old human girl participate enthusiastically in orgies. It's only a few lines, including a really gross one at the end. (She refers to herself—I'm not making this up—as "sucky Satsu".)

I really don't get it. Was there a statement to be made here about Our Hero's uptight devotion to a despicable system? Was it mere provocation? Is Aldiss a serious perv? He's still alive. Maybe someone should ask him.

Anyway, like the other Aldiss stuff I've read, we have a good story marred by a relentlessly gloomy (and ultimately preachy) outlook and (in this case) sexual weirdness.

[PATRICE PRIVAT · Rating 5 out of 5]

J'ai mis 5 étoiles à ce roman de Brian W Aldiss pour tout un tas de raisons : d'abord parce que j'ai été constamment surpris et désarçonné par l'enchainement des événements, époustouflé par les ramifications luxuriantes de l'imagination de l'auteur. On ne sait jamais ce qui va nous tomber dessus.
La poésie avec laquelle est décrite cette autre île du Docteur Moreau (belle référence à H G Wells !), l'étrangeté des créatures monstrueuses , mi-homme mi-animal, bricolées par le successeur du savant fou sur un atoll perdu du Pacifique en pleine guerre nucléaire entre Américains et Chinois (tiens, tiens), tout cela à quoi s'ajoutent le foisonnement d'hypothèses qu'on est contraint de formuler pour expliquer ce qui advient et la qualité des dialogues soignés où s'affirment de surprenantes conceptions du monde qui font écho à notre époque actuelle; c'est véritablement du grand art, un enchantement qui transcende l'horreur. Le traducteur a aussi réussi à rendre beau et élégant le texte original américain. Une vraie réussite qui m'a subjugué. j'ai l'impression d'avoir vécu 3 jours sur cette île maléfique à tenter de trouver des alliés pour échapper à l'emprise du Maitre au fouet et à ses démoniaques laboratoires et le dénoncer aux autorités Américaines, pour finalement y renoncer pour des raisons qu'il vous appartiendra de découvrIr. On notera aussi l'émergence d'un thème qui n'était guère populaire en 1981 quand le livre fut écrit : les dangers des médicaments administrés sans discernement pour le profit et la corruption d'intérêts privés, suivez mon regard, Albert Bourlat !

[Hector · Rating 3 out of 5]

No estamos en esta ocasión ante un gran clásico precisamente. A Brian le chiflaba Wells, como ya lo hizo constar con tributos en otros relatos, como el árbol de saliva. Del original de Wells sólo tuve ocasión de ver la película hace mucho tiempo y no fue una temática que me apasionara la verdad. Lo mismo me sucede con este relato de Aldiss, es un relato turbio, enmarcado en una hipotética WWIII y con la tétrica isla dando un trasfondo más tenebroso a las múltiples inquietudes del protagonista.
Lo cierto es que no me encajan este tipo de relatos que tratan de la supuesta división entre humanos y animales (o la línea continua, no sé). ¿Cuál es el punto? Supongo que hacer notar que en el fondo todos nos movemos por los mismos instintos. Para mi no es un tema que se zanje tan fácilmente como con el derrotista final.
La narrativa es fluida y fácil de seguir, muy en la línea del autor. En términos generales un relato ligero que, a mi personalmente, me ha dejado tal cual estaba.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/an-island-called-moreau-moreaus-other-island-by-brian-aldiss/

Not one of the great Aldiss works, I’m afraid. Published in 1981, set during a global war in 1996, the narrator, who is the US Undersecretary of State, crashes on a Pacific island where the sinister Dr Dart, himself an embittered thalidomide victim, has been carrying on the tradition of H.G. Wells’ Dr Moreau by combining animal and humans through experimentation. Various other human exiles also live on the island.

It’s not so much a sequel to the original Wells novel, more an update to the present-ish day. There are a lot of traps about disability, race and gender to fall into here, and I’m sorry to say that Aldiss falls into pretty much all of them. I’m generally a huge Aldiss fan, but I would hesitate to recommend this even to completists.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alternatively this is called 'moreaus other island'..anyhow an extension of the H.G. Wells tale...this title sort of makes more sense as it's not another island ..it's the same one but some years ahead.
Anyhow similar tale...though a rather disturbing orgy takes place towards closure that although is part of the closing narrative is well....a tad worrying..
Anyhow the only other Aldiss I have read are his takes on other literary tales Frankenstein and Dracula so this stands along them.
Will read more of him as I find them but in honesty you don't seem to find his books around so much.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent re-imagining / sequel. By far the best of Aldiss’ fan fiction tributes. But, as mentioned in other reviews, The pedophile sequence is all sorts of disturbing. It’s one thing to get it on with seal people, quite another to include their 5 year old human daughter. I understand the lustful native interlude Aldiss was going for, but my god, man!

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating 2

Thought the opening chapters were okay, but for whatever reason the story never really held my interest.
Setting had promise I thought, future/alternate earth where a world war between several power blocs is currently in progress. Nuclear weapons of some descriptions are being used.
Perhaps I was in the wrong mood for it, but tbh doubt if I will try it again so not for me.

[PJ Ebbrell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, but it has not aged well. I read it, when younger and before I read the Wells' book. Plus ca change, the more they stay the same. I much prefer the idea that some of British Comic Characters are the results of Moreau's experiments in LoEG.

[Neil Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not one of Mr Aldiss's best, in my personal opinion. However, if you enjoyed the H G Wells original Island of Dr Moreau, as I did, then you'll still enjoy this one.

[Herman Schmitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outro pastiche de Aldiss, desta vez com o romance de H. G. Wells.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really bad. Like Island of Dr. Moreau with Marlon Brando bad.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

Would have been 2 stars, but for the completely unnecessary bizarre introduction of paedophilia near the end of the book.

[Adrian Bloxham · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good extension of H G Wells story, distasteful in places

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

An updated version of the H.G. Wells classic, with darker overtones and updated technology. I always felt that the 1999 film version of The Island of Dr. Moreau was based on this tome.

[Ptjerónimo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pastiche mal sucedido. Final confuso. Tradução deficiente.

[Aldana Tinelli · Rating 1 out of 5]

El libro está para 3 estrellas, pero no puedo darle esa calificación por un pequeño detalle.

[Roddy Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘New Master, New Man…

He stands very tall, long prosthetic limbs glistening in the harsh sun, withered body swaying, carbine and whip clasped in artificial hands. Man-beasts cower on the sand as he brandishes his gun in the air…

He is Dr Moreau, ruler of a fabulous, grotesque island, where humans are as brutes and brutes as humans, where the future of the entire human race is being reprogrammed. The place of untold horrors. The place of the New Man….’

Blurb from the 1982 Triad Granada paperback edition.

Aldiss wrote three (at least) of these posthumous sequels one of which, ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ was filmed with, I believe, John Hurt in the title role.
This is an updating of the HG Wells ‘Island of Dr Moreau’ and set in the near future of the Nineteen Eighties. A World War is underway, Man has a base on the moon, the Soviets have invaded Japan and a US Undersecretary of State has escaped from a plane which crashed in the Pacific and ends up on an unknown island which has a giant letter M carved into the cliffs.
The castaway, Calvert Roberts, is picked up in a boat by the surly South African, Hans Maastricht and his strange companion George and taken to the island.
There he first meets the odd natives of the island, strange beast people with a grasp of language but a low IQ.
The ‘Master’ of the island is one Mortimer Dart, who has inherited the legacy of the legendary Dr Moreau (in actuality a Dr McMoreau, with whom Wells, so Dart tells us, was acquainted and used as the model for his legendary novel.)
Dart, it transpires, is a thalidomide victim, having only rudimentary arms and legs and ‘a penile deformity’. This has led him to create prosthetic arms and legs, some of which have tools or weapons instead of hands.
Roberts, initially disturbed and horrified by both the hybrid creatures who have been living on the island since Moreau’s time, and the way Dart treats them, is desperate to get away. Fate seems to taunt him since his actions bring about only chaos and death. It appears that Roberts is losing his own humanity as the beast people are gaining theirs, as when, in leaping from a cliff to avoid being killed by the animal mob, he ends up with a group of thalidomide Japanese ‘seal’ people and their normal human four year old daughter. Roberts is seduced into a group orgy with the entire family, actions which seem perfectly acceptable to him in that context. The seal-people, as Dart’s assistant Hans has already told him, were humans who had been made into seal-like flippered creatures by the effects of thalidomide and perhaps moving back to an innocent state of animal-like grace.
It is interesting that the action takes place in isolation while a World War rages across the rest of the planet. Roberts then discovers that not only does the government know about the island, but that his own department has sanctioned and supported Dart’s work.
Dart’s true work is to produce a ‘replacement’ race that can survive the fall out from a nuclear war.

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Galardonado con premios como el Nebula, el Hugo, el Kurd Lasswitz y el British Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss es todo un referente de la ficción especulativa. Considerado el más prestigioso representante de la llamada “nueva ola de escritores británicos” –quienes renovaron el panorama de la ciencia ficción a mediados del siglo pasado–, Aldiss nos legó una interesante obra, dentro de la cual se enmarca “La otra isla del Doctor Moreau”.
La novela es narrada por Calvin Madle Roberts, un importante miembro del gobierno norteamericano, quien regresa a la Tierra tras un viaje a la Luna; su cápsula espacial cae en el Pacífico mas, mientras esperan ser rescatados, el resto de la tripulación muere, víctima de un sabotaje. Solo y desamparado, Roberts divisará a lo lejos una isla donde Mortimer Dart –conocido como el Amo, quien domina el lugar– lleva a cabo experimentos que siguen la línea trazada por el doctor Moreau, personaje creado en la inmortal “La isla del doctor Moreau”, de H. G. Wells.
Es a dos grandes del género a quienes Aldiss les rinde homenaje con esta ficción: el primero –y más obvio– es Wells; la segunda es Mary Shelley –de hecho, el capítulo XII se titula “El proceso de Frankestein”– pues, como el doctor Victor Frankestein, el Amo pretende romper el orden natural y crear vida artificialmente (cabe hacer mención de otra novela de Aldiss, “Frankenstein desencadenado”, asimismo claro homenaje a esta autora).
Sin ser tan intrigante y adictiva como la de Wells, esta novela logra transportarnos al ambiente alucinante de aquella mítica isla.

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I reread the ebook edition released by Open Road Media and enjoyed revisiting this novel. It's a quick read and intended more as a sequel than a reimagining. However, the characters are new and each is updated for the tropes you'd expect to find in a 1980s science fiction novel. This includes a lunar base from which the hero, Calvert Roberts, had departed when a crash landing saw him beached and barely alive on the island.

Despite my enjoyment, I resisted boosting the rating up to 4 stars because I just didn't find the protagonist likeable enough. He never seems to understand the politics of his situation and repeatedly uses clumsy threats to try to get the mad doctor (Mortimer Dart) to facilitate his return to civilization. There's also a very unfortunate segment with a family of seal-people involving pedophilia that is thoroughly disgusting, but it's brief. I can only guess that it is included so that we are never entirely on anybody's side in this struggle, but I would have been happier to have this excised from the novel entirely.

The plot arc is very similar to the H.G Wells original in essence, providing a comfortable familiarity that blends the old and new quite effectively.

[Cécile · Rating 2 out of 5]

For some reason, although I've enjoyed Aldiss's work in the past, this one didn't grab me at all. This may be because of the somewhat unconvincing, and utterly unsympathetic, protagonist (a stuck-up bureaucrat who also sounds like a Christian fanatic sometimes, yet appear to entertain a very particular kind of Christianity, which remains barely explored), the plot that sounds rather unfinished (it begins and ends with plenty of unanswered questions, and evolves very little in the middle), or the unconvincing secondary characters (diverse as they are, most of them are still caricatures). Add in it a dash of paedophilia-cum-incest paraded as savage innocence for good measure, and that's about the reason why I was not extremely impressed. Either I did miss a very fine point and I'm to fault, or the book did sound as if it was trying to tackle some difficult, clever subjects, and just didn't manage to get a grip on them.

[Alexandra Rolo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Se ainda não leram o orignal do Wells então tratem disso e só depois podem pegar neste. Não é que não percebam, mas simplesmente não tem a mesma piada (acho eu).
Esta foi uma das compras da Feira do Livro deste ano e foi lido hoje num par de horinhas. A história pega na de Wells e na ilha de Moreau mas como se a precedente tivesse sido de facto verdade. Assim temos uma vez mais um sobrevivente de um acidente a chegar a uma estranha ilha com monstros.
A linha narrativa é mais ou menos a mesma sendo a maior diferença a época em que esta se passa (no futuro). É uma leitura interessante e que nos leva a pensar quais são as repercussões que a FC pode ter na vida real.

in: http://livrosportodolado.blogs.sapo.p...

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another classic science fiction, written in 1980 and set in the then near future as the world approaches another major war. Here we have a crash victim rescued onto an island on which various genetic experiments have been carried out. Picking up and taking forward the story-line started in the original HG Wells story.

Not my favourite Aldiss book, but he takes the story on at a reasonable rate, continuing to unfold disquieting truths behind the island laboratory and of what darkness human minds are capable off.