Verne established the form Wells then turned against: a rational traveller carried to an inaccessible place by a brilliant man who has removed himself from society and built a private kingdom there, with the science explained at length as the story goes. Wells keeps the apparatus and reverses the verdict. Nemo's submarine is a marvel and his misanthropy is tragic; Moreau's island is a torture chamber and his rigour is the horror. Wells was explicit that his scientific romances were doing something other than Verne's, which he regarded as prediction rather than fable, and the disagreement is what makes the debt legible.