In IM (1897) Wells arguably devised something just as aesthetically ahead of its time as any of the optical speculations of his earlier fiction: the generation of a whole fiction from a single trope – metonymy – in a way that created a brilliantly reflexive match between form and theme. This particular novella also characterises the intertextuality of Wells's early work with the narrative grammar and manifold philosophical and political implications of what would become the great popular medium of the modern period. It was in IM that Wells both came closest to the editorial basis of film narrative and, in turn, created one of his most intriguing commentaries on, and opportunities for, cinema itself.

As in TM, Wells modernised an occult theme with roots in ancient myth and folklore, in this case found from Plato's story of the regicidal Gyges's invisibility ring, which he uses to seize power surreptitiously, to the caps and cloaks of Celtic fairytale and medieval romance. As in TM, he did this in terms which are symptomatic of the problematisation of visibility and presence in Victorian science and popular culture, using theories about ‘optical density’ and lowering the ‘refractive index of a substance … to that of air’, probably influenced by C. H. Hinton's scientific romance about an invisible woman, Stella (1895). In this sense, altered states of vision and/or equivocal forms of in/visibility are essential to Wells's mediadecentred exploration of modern subjectivity. They provide a means of assault on the concept of ‘objective’ social identity. The ‘whole fabric of a man’, as Griffin explains, ‘except the red of his blood and the black pigment of his hair’ is largely made up of colourless tissue in different states: ‘So little suffices to make us visible one to the other’ (IM, p. 91).

The contradictory impact of new optical science on the popular imagination stemmed from the way it materialised what was invisible to the naked eye. The uncertainty of the visible was an underlying motive for the anatomisations of motion which provided the scientific drive towards moving pictures.