Before the Rabbit Hole, There Was Griffin
H.G. Wells published The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance in 1897, after the story first appeared serially in Pearson’s Weekly. The Morgan Library’s copy of the first edition dates to that same year. The premise is familiar enough now that it barely needs explaining. Griffin is a scientist who discovers how to make himself invisible. Which sounds useful right up until you start thinking about it for longer than thirty seconds. He can make himself invisible, but he cannot simply turn himself visible again. Clothes can still be seen. Food creates practical problems. Weather still exists. Other people remain other people. And Griffin himself is not exactly the sort of man you would ideally hand an extraordinary new power and then leave unsupervised. The basic idea is wonderfully simple. What if someone could become invisible? Wells then spends the novel making that question progressively less convenient. If you have never actually read the original novel, The Invisible Man is available free through Project Gutenberg. It is in the public domain in the United States, which makes revisiting a nineteenth-century classic considerably easier than hunting down the exact copy you once had in high school.Finishing One Book Made Me Want the Older Ones
The part I remember most clearly isn’t simply the plot. It is what happened afterward. I started looking for more science fiction. More importantly, I started looking backward. There was suddenly this whole older layer of the genre sitting behind the things I already knew. H.G. Wells. Older speculative fiction. The books and writers that helped establish ideas science fiction would spend the next century borrowing, changing, arguing with, and occasionally attaching much larger spaceships to. I didn’t have some grand reading plan. I wasn’t conducting a historical survey of speculative literature. I was a high-school kid who finished a book and thought, basically: What else is there? That may be one of the best questions a book can leave behind.Sometimes the most important book isn’t the best book you ever read. It’s the one that teaches you where to look next.
There Is Something Weird About Returning to Your First Sci-Fi Novel
The first time I read The Invisible Man, I didn’t have decades of other science fiction sitting behind it. Now I do. That makes going back strange. The first time, Wells was helping establish part of my understanding of what science fiction could be. Now I am returning with everything that came afterward piled into my head. Different books. Different movies. Games. Worlds. Ideas about technology, humanity, faith, power, artificial intelligence, empires, personhood, and all the other subjects science fiction keeps finding new machinery to argue about. So I don’t think the question is simply: Does The Invisible Man still hold up? That is part of it. But I am more interested in something else. Can I still see what made me keep looking?The Invisible Man Was Already Old When I Found It
There is another strange part of returning to a book like this. The Invisible Man was published in 1897. By the time I encountered Griffin in high school, the idea of an invisible person was hardly new anymore. It had been recycled through films, television, comics, cartoons, superheroes, horror stories, jokes, games, and probably several cereal commercials by then. That creates an odd problem for old science fiction. Sometimes you encounter the descendants before meeting the ancestor. An idea can feel familiar because you’ve already seen dozens of versions of it, even if the original work was doing something startling for its time. So part of rereading Wells means trying to scrape away that century of accumulated invisibility stories and look at what he was actually doing with the idea. Not simply: Invisible man. Neat trick. But: What does invisibility actually do to a person?The Interesting Part Was Never Just Being Invisible
This is one reason I think the premise has lasted. Invisibility is the hook. Griffin is the problem. Wells doesn’t give an extraordinary ability to a perfectly reasonable man who uses it to sneak into movie theaters and avoid awkward conversations. He gives it to someone ambitious, isolated, increasingly desperate, and willing to push well past the point where most people might reconsider the whole experiment. That turns a technological idea into a human one. Science fiction does this constantly. The technology matters because of what it allows the writer to expose. A machine can change. A society can change. A human body can change. But the people involved still bring themselves along. That complication is a large part of what keeps pulling me back to science fiction now. The best speculative idea isn’t only interesting because it is possible, impossible, futuristic, or weird. It becomes interesting when somebody has to live with it.I’m Not Going Back to Prove High-School Me Was Right
Nostalgia makes rereading dangerous. You remember how something felt and quietly start demanding that the book recreate the person you were when you first read it. Books are very bad at this. They just sit there. We do all the changing. So I don’t want to reread The Invisible Man simply to confirm that teenage me had impeccable literary judgment. He almost certainly did not. I want to see what is actually there. Maybe parts will feel more dated than I remember. Maybe the language will feel strange. Maybe things I thought were brilliant will seem much simpler now. And maybe parts I barely noticed the first time will turn out to be far more interesting. That’s the point of going back. You cannot read the same book twice because you cannot bring the same reader.The book has been sitting still. I’m the part of this reread that changed.
The Books That Start Something Get Graded Differently
I think there are several ways a book can become important. Some are simply exceptional books. You finish them and know immediately that you just read something special. Others become important because of what they cause. They send you to another author. They make you browse a different part of the bookstore or library. They introduce a genre that turns into a lifelong interest. They give you a question you keep finding in other stories. They quietly change your creative vocabulary. The Invisible Man belongs in that category for me. I can already name science-fiction stories that have become more important to me in other ways. But this one came first. It opened a door. And what came through that door eventually became part of the reason science fiction still occupies so much space inside EpicAgain.The Rabbit Hole Eventually Leads Back to Creativity
The interesting thing about looking backward is that connections appear that weren’t obvious while they were happening. One science-fiction novel led to more science-fiction novels. Those led into other worlds, other writers, other ideas, movies, games, settings, and stories. Eventually consuming those worlds starts creating another problem. You want to make things. You start thinking about why fictional societies work the way they do. Why writers choose certain technologies. What makes one imagined history feel enormous while another feels like a collection of encyclopedia entries. What questions you would ask differently. That curiosity is part of what I am returning to through The Creative Return. And it feeds directly into the worldbuilding I am doing now. I don’t think teenage me finished The Invisible Man and immediately began plotting all of that. Life is rarely polite enough to arrange itself into that clean a story. But looking backward, I can see the trail. This book is sitting surprisingly close to the beginning of it.Returning Doesn’t Mean Trying to Become That Reader Again
This is also where rereading The Invisible Man connects to the bigger idea behind EpicAgain. I am not trying to go backward. I don’t want to recreate high school. I don’t want to read exactly the books I read then and somehow reset the clock. That isn’t really what returning means to me. The useful part of returning is finding something that mattered before and asking what it can become now. Same book. Different reader. Much larger pile of science fiction in between. That seems like a more interesting experiment anyway.Time to See the Invisible Man Again
I already know what happened after I first finished The Invisible Man. I kept reading science fiction. I went looking for older books. I found more worlds. Eventually those interests became part of how I think about stories and part of what I want to create myself. That history gives Wells’s novel a permanent place for me whether the reread reveals a masterpiece, a fascinating historical artifact, a book with some very visible wrinkles, or some combination of all three. I don’t need it to be exactly what I remember. Actually, I hope it isn’t. There isn’t much point in returning to an old book if the only thing you’re willing to find is your old opinion. I already know where The Invisible Man sent me. Now I want to remember what I actually found there.
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August 18, 2026