Like many of his novels, H.G. Wells' 1897 novel The Invisible Man centered around a mad scientist protagonist; the eccentric character, a man named Griffin, invents an invisibility formula that is centered around the refractive index of a body's light, and as the title suggests, it works, rendering him completely invisible. Wells felt a strong kinship with the Invisible Man; when he felt invisible himself in his own life quite regularly, and often pondered whether or not anyone would notice if one day he completely disappeared.
Griffin has a passion for random acts of horrible violence and murder, both of which are considerably easier now that nobody can see him carrying them out. Despite its horror genre, the book is sometimes considered to be a work of young adult fiction, and Wells himself claimed that he took stories that would appeal to children, and reworked them so that they would appeal to adults. The inspiration for this particular novel was W. S. Gilbert's The Perils of Invisibility. He was also captivated by Plato's contention that a man in possession of the power of invisibility could do whatever he wanted without fear of retribution.
On the face of it, The Invisible Man is exactly what it says in the literary can; it is a story about a man who becomes invisible. Underneath the semantics of the title, though, it is the story of a man who feels that he does not fit into society very well, and who feels that there is nobody who cares about him, or notices if he is there or not. It is also in many ways a philosophy book since it is the development of Wells' interpretation of Plato's theories of free will and right and wrong as they pertain to a man who has been rendered invisible.
Not surprisingly, the novel captured the public's imagination, not least because we have all at one time imagined what we might get up to if we were given an invisibility cloak for a day. The first big screen adaptation appeared in 1933, directed by James Whale, with Claude Rains, a horror film stalwart, in the title role. It has even been adapted by Bollywood with Bollywood idol Krishna as Griffin.
Wells is considered to be the godfather of science fiction writing, although he is a sociologist, and an armchair scientist who genuinely wanted to push the world forward so that man could fulfill his potential. He even created the blueprint for a system of computer communication that looks like a forerunner of the internet. Before penning The Invisible Man Wells published two other science fiction novels, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Wells was a four-time Nobel Prize for Literature nominee.
