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

close friend the astronomer Richard Gregory as he wrote the book, to ensure that the fantastic science of the book was as plausible and persuasive as possible. Gregory recommended James Nasmyth and James Carpenter’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (1874) as an ‘astronomical classic’ and advised Wells that ‘a man who can step two feet here could with the same exertion step 12 feet on the moon’.12 The November 1900 issue of the Strand included an article on ‘The First Moon-Photographs Taken with the Great Paris Telescope’, which concluded, in a very Wellsian fashion, that

the appearances noted in these photographs completely re-establish and confirm the old theory that the moon is but a mass of volcanic basalt without atmosphere and without life, another proof of the universality of the law of growth and decay, and an awe-inspiring example of what our own planet may someday be when more cycles of millions of years have rolled by.13

The moon’s very emptiness thus often means that, when represented in literature, it needs to take its signifying value from somewhere else. Bedford reproaches himself for his ‘incurable anthropomorphism’ (p. 79), but, understandably enough, in order to populate his imaginary moon-world, his frame of reference is drawn from the earth, with, as in so many fictional representations of the moon, an inevitable satirical effect on whatever aspect of terrestrial life is being mirrored. After Cavorite is successfully created, Cavor describes himself as ‘effervescing with new ideas — new points of view’ (p. 10); later, on discovering that the moon is hollow he reflects that ‘One gets into habits of mind’ (p. 73). It is absolutely key to Wells’s fictional method that ‘new points of view’ created by the text’s fantastic elements should disrupt established habits in the mind of the reader. If one’s point of view is from space or the moon, the world will look radically different. Even ‘up’ and ‘down’ are denatured once the travellers leave the earth: truths that had seemed as solid as the ground beneath their feet now seem hazy and uncertain. Here Bedford shows his view of the earth being denatured by his being cut adrift from it (incidentally anticipating the estranging effect on the human mind of the first photographs of the earth from space):

We were still very near — Cavor told me the distance was perhaps eight hundred miles — and the huge terrestrial disk filled all heaven. But already it was plain to see that the world was a globe. The land below us was in twilight and vague, but westward the vast grey stretches of the Atlantic shone like molten silver under the receding day. I think I recognised the cloud-dimmed coast-lines of France and Spain and the south of England, and then, with a click, the shutter closed again, and I found myself in a state of extraordinary confusion sliding slowly over the smooth glass. (p. 31)

Bedford is disorientated by his ‘perception of the impossible’ (p. 36); the travellers’ sense of the passing of time, and even of their own bodies, becomes radically altered. Bedford experiences

a pervading doubt of my own identity. I became, if I may so express it, dissociate from Bedford; I looked down on Bedford as a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be connected. […] I was no more Bedford than I was any one else, but only a mind floating in the still serenity of space. Why should I be disturbed about this Bedford’s shortcomings? I was not responsible for him or them. (p. 127)

Wells is generally hostile to the Greek and Latin classics, as he felt that their being privileged as an object of study was detrimental to scientific and technological progress. However, The First Men in the Moon, unusually, takes an epigraph from a classical text, Lucian’s Icaromenippus. In this text the personified moon mocks the attempts of philosophers to understand her. The genre of Icaromenippus is that of the Menippean satire, which according to the twentieth-century Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin is characterized by a combination of parody, satire, and utopia in order to depict ‘extraordinary situations for the purpose of testing philosophical truth, especially through the manipulation of perspective’.14 For Wells and for so many other writers, to write in the fantastic mode is to write about the real world; according to a laudatory account of the philosophical aspects of The First Men in the Moon in The Cosmopolitan in 1902 by Wells’s friend and fellow novelist Arnold Bennett, here ‘in the guise of romance, is a serious criticism of life’.15 Wells’s very best books self-consciously occupy more than one genre at the same time. Just as The Wheels of Chance can be both a mock-chivalric romance and also a heartbreakingly realistically depiction of the economically constrained life of a junior draper, and The Sea Lady (1900) both the fantastic tale of a mermaid on dry land and a lampooning of the rules of polite society, so too is The First Men in the Moon simultaneously both a fantastic text and a satire, a thrilling adventure story and a parody of an adventure story — a genre which was very closely associated with the Strand Magazine.

Decidedly middlebrow in emphasis, the Strand included, alongside fiction by Walter Besant, Mary Braddon, Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne, and L. T. Meade, political sketches, writing for children, pictures of famous actresses, babies and pets, illustrated interviews with celebrities, and amusing photographs sent in by readers. Above all the Strand was associated with stories of heroic adventure — the last instalment of The First Men in the Moon, in August 1901, overlapped with the first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. The first instalment of First Men was followed in turn by a historical article by Beckles Willson on ‘The Evolution of Our Map’, the India-set story ‘The Serpent Charmer’ by A. Sarath Kumar Ghosh, and Dr Olinda Malagodi’s photo-illustrated Arctic travelogue ‘Further North than Nansen’. (Bedford ponders before the sphere launches that ‘to go into outer space is not so