SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA

The Mexican-Canadian author talks about reinventing HG Wells

- Jonathan Wright

SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA TOYED WITH THE idea of doing a novel that riffed on HG Wells’s SF mad-scientist urtext The Island Of Dr Moreau for quite some time before her own book came into focus. The problem, she realised, was Wells’s setting: a remote island in the Pacific.

“When I figured that I could move the action to Mexico in the 19th century, that’s when everything made sense,” she says. “And that’s when I was able to move forward. I had a location and a time period, specificity that helped me be able to handle the material.”

The result is The Daughter Of Dr Moreau. It’s a novel that takes many of the familiar elements of Wells’s work, like Moreau’s creation of human-like hybrid beings, yet brings a different sensibility to the story. “It’s not a pastiche, it’s not intended to be a reproduction of Wells,” she says of a book that deals with class, colonialism, sexism and race.

Nevertheless, it’s most definitely an SF novel, something Moreno-Garcia is at pains to emphasise. She’s wary when SFX suggests there’s a Gothic element. “The trouble for me is that if I say Gothic, people sometimes expect certain things naturally – for example, ghosts,” she says. “I had this happen with Mexican Gothic, where some people told me they liked the novel but they were unhappy it had a science fiction element.” Such are the difficulties when navigating reader expectations and questions of genre.

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