The First Men in the Moon was written by H.G. Wells and first appeared simultaneously in Cosmopolitan in New York (Nov 1900-June 1901) and The Strand in London (Nov 1900-Aug 1901). Although Wells (1866-1946) is known today primarily for his science fiction, during his lifetime he was one of the most prolific, versatile, and popular writers in the English language.

The First Men in the Moon is about the first trip to the moon. The narrator, Mr. Bedford, is a bit of a scoundrel, a failed businessman who goes to Lympne, on the Channel, to write a play and, he thinks, to get rich quickly. There he meets the eccentric scientist Professor Cavor, and after an initially brusque meeting (Bedford, easily annoyed, vents his spleen at Cavor for the latter's eccentricities) the two warm to each other and become friends. Cavor tells Bedford about his plans to discover a substance which will be “opaque...to all forms of radiant energy,”¹meaning that it will cancel out gravity itself. Cavor experiments, and eventually discovers a metallic alloy which when combined with helium and allowed to cool does just that. Cavor is exultant, but it is Bedford who sees the monetary possibilities for the new element “cavorite.” The next step, for Cavor, is to go to the moon in a sphere covered in cavorite, and somewhat reluctantly Bedford accompanies him. The trip to the moon is uneventful, but once there they discover that the moon has a strange, alien landscape, with bizarre, fast-growing and fast-dying plants, as well as strange aliens. Bedford and Cavor are temporarily taken prisoner by the "Selenites" or "Mooneys," but after being marched beneath the moon's surface and then through a part of the Selenite's underground world they fight their way free. They flee, pursued by the Selenites, and do some exploring before making their way to the moon's surface. They split up, trying to find their ship (which they had earlier lost), and Bedford finds it. He looks for Cavor but finds evidence that the Selenites have captured him. Bedford returns to the ship and pilots it home, undergoing an out of body experience on the way. He lands the ship in the waters off the coast of England, but thanks to the carelessness of a child the sphere is propelled back into space, leaving Bedford with only the gold he took from the moon. Some months later an Italian astronomer begins receiving signals from Cavor, who had been captured but not killed by the Selenites. Over the space of several weeks Cavor transmits sixteen messages, describing the Selenites' segmented, insectile civilization and his meeting with the Selenites' leader, the Grand Lunar, in which the Grand Lunar quizzes Cavor about humanity and human civilization. The last message from Cavor is broken up, but implies that the Grand Lunar has revealed himself to be malign after all.

The First Men in the Moon is seen as the last of Wells' great “scientific romances,” but modern readers are likely to find it a lesser work compared to The Island of Doctor Moreau and War of the Worlds. The First Men in the Moon isn’t bad, certainly. It is rather entertaining, and not without positive qualities. But the satire of First Men is lighter in tone and less pointed than the messages of War of the Worlds and Doctor Moreau, and the themes are dealt with less seriously. First Men is a satire, of imperialism and capitalism; Bedford comes off as an awful ass, greedy, exploitive, ignorant and heartless, and Cavor's justifications for human evils like war are self-evidently absurd. Bedford and Cavor are straw men for Wells; he sets them up to be ridiculous and then knocks them down. It makes for acceptable but not particularly incisive satire. Not entirely satirical is the portrayal of the Selenites’ civilization, which is prophetic (a common mode for Wells) and “has sociological implications of a characteristic kind:”²

Wells employs another form of generic dialogue in order to stage the problem of understanding the exotic other in the context of scientific exploration and colonialist appropriation. The alien ethnography in the final section of First Men in the Moon is one of the most influential such pieces in early science fiction. Wells constructs the underground lunar society of the Selenites on the model of an insect hive, producing not just a set of ancestors for the infamous bug-eyed monsters of the pulp illustrators, but also a version of the social organization of labor that resonates with dystopian fictions like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), because of the Selenites’ complete disregard for the rights or fulfillment of the individual as compared to the achievement of organized social aims. But Wells’s depiction of Selenite specialization is not clearly dystopian, hovering instead on the boundary between coherent realization of the science fiction premise— that hive insects could evolve into a highly intelligent species with a complex industrial society— and satirical commentary on early-twentieth century England.³

Contemporary reviewers of First Men in the Moon viewed it as a relatively lightweight work from Wells, and modern critics have paid much less attention to it than to War of the Worlds or Invisible Man. Even lesser Wells, though, is entertaining. First Men is fast-moving, with a lot of light humor which was missing from War of the Worlds and Doctor Moreau. The science is, if not plausible, at least respectable. Wells took some pains to make sure that First Men was not scientifically implausible, and so First Men is for the most part much closer to reality than War of the Worlds or Doctor Moreau are. Things like zero gravity space flight and the low gravity on the moon are used, and without the overt pedantry of Jules Verne. The moon is suitably strange, and the Selenites are distinctly alien in appearance and personality without being at all absurd. The physical description of the moon and of the Selenites' caverns are well-done. And the comedy of Bedford and Cavor, who as explorers and conquerors of the moon lose their ship, get high on moon mushrooms, leap about carelessly, act in a quarrelsome and disagreeable manner to each other, and even use broken English on the Selenites (“'Me look 'im,' he said, "me think 'im very much. Yes"⁴) is amusing.

Print: H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon. Oxford: Oxford University, 2017.

¹ H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (London: G. Newnes, 1901), 20.

² Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1961), 157.

³ John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 2008), 71.

⁴ H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (London: G. Newnes, 1901), 158.