The Invention of Morel

Content Warning: The source material uses an outdated, offensive term to refer to Roma people. This language has been preserved only in quotation.

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s most famous work, drew inspiration from one of the early entries in the genre of science fiction, H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. The name Morel is an homage to Wells’s creation, but the similarities do not end there. Both are epistolary novels, consisting of found diaries written by first-person narrators. In each book, the narrator arrives by sea, whether by shipwreck or by choice as a fugitive, on a remote island owned by a scientist who carries out cutting-edge and highly unethical experiments. Whereas Doctor Moreau engages in vivisection, creating human-animal hybrids, Morel works in full sensory projections of people and moments. Both result in their subjects’ suffering and death, and both narrators are unable (or unwilling) to integrate back into human society at the end of the novel.

Bioy Casares was a friend and colleague of Jorge Luis Borges, and Borges penned an introduction to The Invention of Morel, calling the book an “odyssey of marvels” (7).