Book excerpt: A castaway government official is stranded on an island of man-made monsters in this bold reimagining of the H. G. Wells science fiction classic War is hell, and the conflict tearing the world apart may be humankind’s last. Set adrift on a makeshift raft in the middle of the South Pacific, the sole survivor of a sabotaged space-shuttle flight, undersecretary of state Calvert Roberts is certain his life is coming to an end. But fate intervenes, depositing him dehydrated and half starved on the beach of an uncharted island with a giant M etched into a cliff wall. At first it appears to be paradise, but Eden has a dark side: Here, Dr. Mortimer Dart is playing God. A genius geneticist who is certifiably mad, he is called Master by the unspeakable creations of his predecessor—monstrous creatures, neither human nor animal but some nightmarish hybrid. Yet as horrible as the stranded government official finds these abominations, it is the truth behind Dart’s experiments that chill Roberts’s blood—for it will open wide a window onto an inescapable future of emptiness, ashes, and death. One of twentieth-century science fiction’s brightest luminaries, Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss pays homage to one of the genre’s most beloved progenitors, the great H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and other science fiction classics. An Island Called Moreau is a gripping near-future tale of inhuman experimentation, dystopia, morality, war, and mad science that honors and ingeniously updates Wells’s brilliant, dark masterwork, The Island of Doctor Moreau.