The First Men in the Moon, H. Wells [latest books to read .TXT] 📗

a splendidly contrived nightmare’.10 The reviewer in Nature also praised Wells for the efforts he made to familiarize himself with the extent of scientific knowledge about the moon; more than one reviewer hoped for a sequel that would reveal more about the fate of the characters. In the 1924 preface written for the Atlantic edition of Wells’s works, the author judges this to be the best of all his scientific romances.

While not as popular as the 1890s romances with film-makers, there have been several attempts to adapt The First Men in the Moon for the screen. A no-longer extant silent version was filmed in 1919. ‘To give the story mass appeal,’ according to Michael Sherborne’s recent biography of Wells, ‘the script adds a love interest between Cavor’s niece and a telegraphist called Hannibal Higden, brought together in a happy ending when Cavor’s radio messages expose Bedford as a dastardly villain.’11 The book was adapted again for cinema by Nigel Kneale in 1964, starring Lionel Jeffries, and with special effects by renowned animator Ray Harryhausen. This version fulfils Wells’s hopes for international cooperation in showing a landing on the moon by a United Nations space agency, which discovers proof that Cavor, Bedford, and the latter’s American fiancée Kate have landed on the moon years before them. Here, the ending echoes the defeat of the invading Martians by earth’s microbes in The War of the Worlds, as Cavor chooses to remain on the moon in order to infect the Selenites, preventing them from ever invading the earth. In 2010 Doctor Who writer Mark Gatiss wrote, and played Cavor in, a television version for the BBC, with Rory Kinnear as a handsome and cynical Bedford. The prologue of this film wittily shows a much aged Bedford on the day of the Apollo moon landing recalling his own ‘small step’. Again, Cavor chooses here to remain on the moon and extinguish the Selenites rather than see them invade the earth, repeating on purpose his earlier accident and using Cavorite to destroy the moon’s atmosphere. The company Alien Voices, which includes several members of the cast of Star Trek, also produced an audio dramatization, released in 1999, in which the sphere is launched from the United States, and Leonard Nimoy’s amiably buzzing Cavor exposes the claims of moon society’s perfection made by William Shatner’s Grand Lunar as false, when he discovers the existence of slave labour and rebellious and discontented Selenites.

H. G. Wells, Fantastic Transport, and the Moon

Stories of travelling to the moon have a long history in Western culture. Such stories are frequently marked by two common characteristics: the imagining of the fantastic technology needed to get there, and satirical reflections on the nature of the terrestrial world left behind. In Bishop Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither (published 1638), the hero Domingo Gonsales travels to the moon in a machine powered by a flock of geese. Edgar Allan Poe’s would-be hoax, which many readers took as fact, ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfalal’ (1835), uses a giant balloon to transport its eponymous hero; in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), the Baltimore Gun Club fire a capsule around the moon from an enormous cannon. For The First Men in the Moon, Wells borrows the notion of a substance resistant to gravity from the pseudonymous Chrystostom Trueman’s The History of a Voyage to the Moon (1864).

Although this is his only book in which humans travel beyond the planet, Wells’s interest in fantastic forms of technology extends far beyond The First Men in the Moon: from the humble bicycles of The Wheels of Chance (1896) and The History of Mr Polly (1910), to the moving walkways and gliders of When the Sleeper Wakes (1898–9; rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes in 1910); from the ‘Land Ironclads’ (1903), a short story first published in the Strand, which foresees the tank, to the Martians’ tripods in The War of the Worlds, and to the eponymous Time Machine, which itself in turn resembles a bicycle. While Wells’s repeated invention in these stories of fantastic or accelerated motive technology shows humans travelling further, or more quickly, than is possible in the real world, for Wells such a journey is never about just being along for the ride: the importance of the fantastic journey lies very much in how much and how differently you can see when you arrive. Distance, for Wells, always lends perspective: seeing further should mean understanding more. In Ann Veronica (1909), the heroine and her lover Capes look down upon the civilized world from their Alpine holiday and see truly how poorly arranged it currently is; the nations of the world voluntarily surrender their own government to the literally further-sighted giant children of The Food of the Gods (1904). Once the Wellsian traveller is able to see his or her point of origin from further away, he or she should be able to apply useful lessons back to their own world. The Time Traveller, for instance, voyages to the year 802701, and returns with a tale that should warn his audience about the evolutionary consequences of Victorian society’s increasing class inequality. More emphatically, in Wells’s first book of political and utopian thought, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1900), he claims that existing new technologies of transport have resulted in the ‘abolition of distance’ between neighbouring nations, and that consequently nations should abolish themselves and form a World State instead. This idea would come to dominate Wells’s vast twentieth-century output of books and journalism, making him even more famous as a prophet and guru in his own lifetime rather than a writer of fiction.

At the time when Wells was writing this book, the surface of the moon was known to be a dead world; Wells wittily thus places life on the moon underneath the surface, hence The First Men in the Moon. Wells corresponded with his