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

person’s projection of their own desires upon the world as they see it, and that what might be one person’s utopia could be unbearably repressive for another. Even a society organized as to make its citizens efficient and effective might not necessarily be guaranteed to make them happy as well.20 The deliberate shaping of Selenite society is, from the human point of view, super-rational and terrifying, simultaneously utopian and dystopian.

What conclusion the reader is supposed to draw from Wells’s tantalizing self-contradiction is by no means clear. Wells often leaves the endings of his science fiction surprisingly unresolved, closing with an image of unintelligibility, such as the vanishing of the time machine, or the invisible man’s water-damaged and illegible notebooks. When Cavor’s broadcasts from the moon come to a gradual halt, it is not clear how or why they have done so:

Just at this point, unhappily, this message broke off. Fragmentary and tantalising as the matter constituting this chapter is, it does nevertheless give a vague, broad impression of an altogether strange and wonderful world — a world with which our own may have to reckon we know not how speedily. This intermittent trickle of messages, this whispering of a record needle in the stillness of the mountain slopes, is the first warning of such a change in human conditions as mankind has scarcely imagined heretofore. In that satellite of ours there are new elements, new appliances, new traditions, an overwhelming avalanche of new ideas. (p. 162)

Wells becomes a less interesting writer later in his career when his writing takes one new idea (most frequently, world government) and fixates on it at length. Wells is at his best, as here, when he is most open to the free play of more than one idea at once, letting themes compete for emphasis as the text unfolds. The dual narration of The First Men in the Moon allows Wells to voice two sides of his creative imagination at once: both the scientific intelligence fixated on the transformative, unifying idea, and the crafty writer on the make (in the Strand text, Bedford playfully signs his name in the hotel’s register as ‘Wells’). Wells is also at his best when his concerns are both global and domestic, thinking both about how the world overall might be better organized, and how it is experienced individually. He is at once a fantastic novelist of grand ideas and a realist who focuses on the ways in which the effects of those ideas are inescapably mediated through lived experience, through the body and the senses, which impose corporeal limits on the understanding and the transmission of these ideas. The narration of The First Men in the Moon gives careful attention to details of heat, light, food, interiors, and clothing. It also attends conscientiously to the capacities and fragilities of the human and Selenite bodies that populate the book: to the effects, for instance, of gravity, of hunger, fatigue, and various forms of corporeal damage. The First Men in the Moon has a whole new world to show to the reader, but is very aware that such a world is framed by human senses and human media. Just as Cavor’s final broadcasts become increasingly fragmented, so too are the narrative’s perceptions of the fantastic often frequently hazy, fogged over, partial. The fragmentary efforts at describing phenomena never before seen by human eyes, such as sunrise on the moon, spur the discourse of the would-be playwright Bedford to heights of literary effect, in a passage, perhaps surprisingly, singled out for praise by T. S. Eliot, as ‘quite unforgettable’:21

Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceive it all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever there was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have the picture of our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we saw it all through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there, and towards the edges magnified and unreal. (p. 49)

Bedford refers to the moon as being like ‘the landscape of a dream’ (p. 53). Wells’s dream of life on the moon is both an escape from terrestrial concerns and a blueprint for an earthly utopia, as yet imperfectly framed. The First Men in the Moon shows both the appeal of the idea of a planned world and its cold undesirability, the book’s utopian longings both a desire for a world better organized for those who inhabit it and, at the same time, moonshine.

1 J. L. Cranfield, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and The Strand Magazine’s Long 1901: From Baskerville to the Moon’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 56 (2013), 3–32 (4).

2 H. G. Wells, The Soul of a Bishop (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 26.

3 For a detailed account of the book’s use of very up-to-date scientific thought, see Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 117–49.

4 George Orwell, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, 20 vols., ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker && Warburg, 1986–98), xiii. A Patriot After All, 536–41.

5 David C. Smith, H. G. Wells, Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 68.

6 Charles Blair, ‘Mr. Wells’s Adventures with Mr. Bedford: Writing The First Men in the Moon’, The Wellsian 37 (2014), 3–14; David Lake, ‘Introduction’, H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon, ed. David Lake (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. xiii–xxvii (p. xxi–xxii).

7 H. G. Wells, The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, 4 vols., ed. David C. Smith (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), i. 361.

8 See Jules Verne, interview with Robert H. Sherard, T. P.’s Weekly, 9 October 1903,