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

a long time — of any further men reaching the moon. The line the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would take seems plain enough to me, and a suspicion of it, and then perhaps some sudden sharp realisation of it, must have come to him. (p. 175)

The last word the earth receives from Cavor is the untranslatable ‘uless’: one of the first two men in the moon will surely end his life there.

The Idea of a Planned World: Life on the Moon

In The Division of Labour in Society (1893), the French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that social order in advanced societies was maintained by effective division of labour, and that breakdowns, such as crime or war, of social bonds were the consequence of labour being wrongly divided. War is impossible in the moon because every Selenite does the job for which their body is specifically modelled: the plastic union between bodily design and social function in the body of every individual Selenite removes the possibility of the lack of fulfilment which might produce social conflict. On earth, by contrast, Cavor’s labourers were all originally trained to do jobs different from those they are undertaking for him; their ceaseless bickering with each other about who should be doing what delays the completion of the sphere. By contrast, ‘In the moon […] every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it’ (p. 157). In his essay ‘Of a Book Unwritten’, in the collection Certain Personal Matters (1899), Wells playfully speculates on the bodily shape into which the ‘Man of the Year Million’ might evolve, imagining a larger brain and even more versatile hands and fingers; the super-adaptations of Selenites such as the living linguist-computer Phi-oo develop this conceit further. As Chesterton observed, Wells scientifically imagines just how life on the moon might have feasibly evolved; from the Grand Lunar down to the lowliest drone, the Selenites are physically moulded as they grow into hundreds of different shapes that match the social roles each individual is intended to occupy. The specialization of the Selenites produces, not the casual uniformity of the human race in general (exceptional individuals such as Cavor aside), but instead a very pronounced range of individualities. (Perhaps, as a scientific expert, Cavor is more like the Selenites than he is the average human, the zu-zoo-ing that initially so irritates Bedford a prefiguring of the constant background hum of the Selenite civilization.) In political works such as A Modern Utopia, Wells argued for the importance of an education system that is not only universal but also specialized enough to develop every individual’s qualities and to fit them for the role they would occupy in society: the body shapes of the Selenites are a literal embodiment of this idea at the evolutionary level. He wrote to Winston Churchill on 19 November 1901 that in The First Men in the Moon, ‘I have been giving the specializer sort to the best of my ability.’18 Cavor witnesses this specialization as he sees a young Selenite in the process of being formed:

That wretched-looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them. (p. 160)

Cavor balks at the Selenite habit of putting drones for whom there is not presently any work into a state of coma when they are not needed, but admits that ‘To drug the worker one does not want and toss him aside is surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving in the streets’ (p. 161). Wells’s realist novels of the 1900s often show human beings educated (or miseducated) for one social role, and then being expected to fulfil happily a different one. The Selenites have no unemployed, no discontented proletariat, no women frustrated by the constraints of Edwardian gender roles like Ann Veronica, no unhappy neglected children or discontented adolescents. Instead, young Selenites are grown to order depending on such work as Selenite society needs doing, brought into being not by loving biological parents but by a ‘class of matrons […], large and stately beings beautifully fitted to bear the larval Selenite […] absolutely incapable of cherishing the young they bring into the moon’, then educated by ‘celibate females […] who in some cases possess brains of almost masculine dimensions’ (p. 162). There were few ideas closer to the typical Victorian heart than that of the sanctity of the family: Wells’s characteristically iconoclastic vision imagines biological and social structures which sweep the nineteenth-century family entirely away, its affections, benevolences, oppressions, and occlusions alike, a spectacle of terrifying and efficient evolutionary success.

Wells’s 1905 short story ‘Empire of the Ants’, also first published in the Strand, shows a species of intelligent poisonous ants super-evolving past humanity’s supposed biological superiority, overwhelming a town and possibly the rest of the world. The Selenites are compared seven times in The First Men in the Moon to ants. Cavor’s — and the reader’s — response to the biology and the culture of the Selenites oscillates between horror, fascination, and admiration of their insectoid efficiency. In sketching the sublunar world Wells is both exercising and burlesquing the world-building imaginative tendencies of his own utopian writing. (Both the late twentieth-century critic Peter Kemp and J. E. Hodder Williams, reviewing the book in 1901, suggest that the Grand Lunar is a lunar reflection of Wells’s own longed-for position as Earth’s World Brain, the ‘Grand Earthly’ that the moon’s ruler is surprised to hear does not exist.19) Wells is a self-aware enough world-builder, at this stage of his career at least, to know that a utopian text is by necessity a single