Gary Inbinder's Reviews > The First Men in the Moon

The story is narrated by Bedford, an impecunious entrepreneur and would-be playwright; the narrative begins in a light and somewhat humorous vein. Bedford has sought refuge in the country to escape his London creditors while writing a play that he hopes will solve his financial woes. He encounters his neighbor Cavor, an eccentric genius with little common sense and a tenuous grip on reality. Cavor is involved in an experiment that, if successful, would produce a gravity-defying substance. The inventor reveals his secret to his new friend; the entrepreneur ponders the commercial possibilities. Thinking Cavor’s experiment might pan out better than a play, Bedford enters into a partnership with the inventor. Discovery of the substance is precipitated by an accident; Cavor’s bumbling assistants fail to tend a furnace with explosive results. Cavorite enters the world with a big bang followed by a cyclone. Realizing his experiment might have blown a hole in earth’s atmosphere, sucked out all the oxygen and left behind a dead planet, Cavor, the single-minded scientist declares:

"If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours, we will. But—there must be risks! There must be. In experimental work there always are.”

Now that the partners have Cavorite, they start thinking about its practical applications. Cavor comes up with the idea of space exploration. After some soul-searching Bedford reluctantly agrees to join Cavor for a journey to the moon. The hesitant Bedford soon warms to the adventure and the wonders of outer space.

"Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine its appearance when the vague, half luminous veil of our air has been withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise the meaning of the hosts of heaven!”

After landing safely on the moon, they discover strange life forms and a breathable atmosphere. But things soon go awry. While practicing their leaps and bounds in a weightless atmosphere, they lose track of the sphere. They also discover that they aren’t alone; the moon is inhabited by intelligent, insect-like beings: the Selenites. Worse yet, while trying to satisfy their growing hunger, Bedford and Cavor eat moon mushrooms, with psychedelic results. What ensues might be described as a cross between Hieronymus Bosch and Gustave Doré’s visualizations of hell and Ren and Stimpy’s “Space Madness”.

The hapless astronauts are captured by the Selenites and subsequently escape. During the following struggles, the more aggressive Bedford discovers his human advantage over the physically weak Selenites:

"My...hand seemed to go clean through him. He smashed.. like some softish.. sweet with liquid in it!.... He squelched and splashed. It was like hitting a damp toadstool. The flimsy body went spinning a dozen yards, and fell with a flabby impact. I was astonished. I was incredulous that any living thing could be so flimsy.”

"....we had met with things like mad mockeries of men...and had walked in fear before them... And behold, they had smashed like wax and scattered like chaff, and fled and vanished like the creatures of a dream! I rubbed my eyes, doubting whether we had not slept and dreamt these things by reason of the fungus we had eaten.”

Having, escaped their captors, the pair sets a marker and splits up to search for the sphere. The first to find the sphere will signal to the other. Now completely alone in a hostile alien world, Bedford’s narrative turns reflective:

"What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battle-ground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do.”

"Assuming I was to die a castaway upon the moon, I failed..to see what purpose I had served. I got no light on that point, but..it was clearer to me than it had ever been...that I was not serving my own purpose, that all my life I had...never served the purposes of my private life. Whose purposes, what purposes, was I serving?”

On the brink of despair, Bedford locates the sphere. But he must find Cavor, and Cavor is not to be found. Bedford discovers a bloody note. Cavor has been injured, and taken captive by the Selenites. Giving his companion up for dead, Bedford returns to the sphere and pilots it back to earth, where he fortuitously lands in the sea near the English coastline. And he doesn’t return empty-handed. Some heavy Selenite tools he used as weapons are made of pure gold.

While Bedford recovers at a seaside hotel, the sphere, which was temporarily left on the beach, is activated by a curious boy. The sphere, with the unfortunate boy inside, takes off for outer space, never to return. Along with the sphere and the boy, the secret of Cavorite and the means of returning to the moon are lost.

The scene shifts to Amalfi where Bedford, living off his moon gold, has resumed work on his play. While there, he learns of mysterious radio signals coming from the moon.

"...a Dutch electrician, who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a curiously fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably emanating from Mr. Cavor in the moon.”

The remainder of the novel focuses on Cavor’s radio transmissions documenting his life among the Selenites. At this point, Wells turns to incisive political satire.

Cavor’s narrative of Selenite society may be read as a parody of Plato’s Republic and other Utopian fantasies. The Selenites are separated by their natural tendencies, abilities and talents and then educated and trained along those lines. Moreover, they are physically, chemically and psychologically altered to form a perfect fit into their ant-like “World-Machine.”

“In the moon," says Cavor, "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.”

"And to rule over these things and order any erring tendency there might be in some aberrant natures are the most muscular beings I have seen in the moon, a sort of lunar police, who must have been trained from their earliest years to give a perfect respect and obedience to the swollen heads.”

“These beings with big heads, on whom the intellectual labours fall, form a sort of aristocracy in this strange society, and at the head of them, quintessential of the moon, is that marvellous gigantic ganglion the Grand Lunar, into whose presence I am finally to come.”

The Selenites treat Cavor like an honored guest. He is assigned two specialists who communicate with him in English, and he’s provided with materials to construct the wireless telegraph that he uses to communicate with earth. All goes well until Cavor is brought before the Grand Lunar, the master of the moon, a huge brain with a vestigial insect-like body. The Grand Lunar questions Cavor about earth, and Cavor answers ingenuously.

"His disastrous want of vulgar common sense had utterly betrayed him. He had talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon world with this impression of our race...”

The novel was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine from December 1900 to August 1901 and published in hardcover in 1901. At the time, the British Empire was at its zenith, and was engaged in the Second Boer War. Cavor mentions a battle of that war in response to the Grand Lunar’s questions. The Victorian era ended with the Queen’s death in January, 1901.