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The First Men in the Moon
by H.G. Wells
by Ted Gioia
For as long as stories have been told, their narrators have
delighted in the possibility of traveling above the surface of the
Earth. When we recall the tale of Icarus, who suffered by soaring
too close to the sun, or hear the words of the psalmist—“Oh that I
had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away”—we recapture in
some degree the essence of this primitive longing. (Track down a
copy of the out-of-print study Voyages to the
Moon (1948) by Marjorie Hope Nicolson for
an expansive history of this literature.)
By the time we get to the works of Jules Verne
and H.G. Wells, these dreams are married to a
modern pride in technology and an unabashed
confidence in scientific advances. As such,
these authors created stories of a different
flavor, freed from the magical and mythical,
and married to a quasi-realistic narrative style.
Novels such as Verne’s From the Earth to the
Moon (1865) and Wells’s The First Men in the
Moon (1901) reveal, in a myriad of small ways,
that they were written by men who not only
dreamed about a lunar voyage, but who had some expectations
about its inevitability.
that film—ah, to be so lucky!—Fred MacMurray relied on flubber
to fly around in a levitated Model T Ford.
Wells has his own absent-minded professor, Dr. Cavor, who is the
inventor of this propulsion system that will send his (rocket-less)
ship to the moon. But the good doctor would hardly be able to put
his ideas into play without the assistance of his more practical and
business-minded neighbor Mr. Bedord. Think of them as the
Victorian equivalents of Wozniak and Jobs. Wells’s concept of
science seems to revolve around workshop eccentrics of this sort—
readers may recall that his “time machine” was also the invention
of a single individual tinkering away at home. Here again Verne is
more realistic in his comprehension that only a large-scale effort
by a huge team, well financed and with a broad range of skills,
could ever make a lunar expedition into a reality.
But if Wells is vague on his applied science, he makes up for it in
his storytelling skills. His narrator, the scheming Bedford, sets an
amusing tone from the outset. He is evading creditors and trying
to put together his life after a failed business venture. His interest
in his neighbor’s scientific theories is pecuniary, pure and simple,
and he dreams of corporate profits and royalty streams. He
constantly interrupts his account of the Moon trip to offer
threadbare excuses and exculpatory explanations for his venal
behavior. He is little better than a scoundrel, but a lovable one all
the same, if only for his persistence in self-justification. His
colleague Cavor is as idealistic as Bedford is mercenary, and Wells
makes use of this contrast in temperaments to impart some bite
and irony to their dialogues and dealings.
After a failed experiment that blows the top off Cavor’s cottage
and causes damage to nearby homesteads, the duo are ready for
their trip. Wells’s concept of the Moon is similar to his
prognostications about the future in The Time Machine. His
travelers encounter a lunar society, living underground, that is so
stratified and hierarchical, that the Age of Feudalism looks like a
hippie commune by contrast. This provides our author with a
platform for social commentary, but he doesn’t get as much
mileage here—certainly not as much as he is able to extract from
the fanciful scenarios of some of his other novels. Some readers,
however, may be grateful for the relatively small amount of
armchair philosophizing, which leaves plenty of room for fights,
escapes, close calls and other swashbuckling interludes.
Wells in this work—as in so many of his best known tales—sets up
a conflict between his protagonists and the amorphous
surrounding social forces. The villains in these stories are rarely
distinguished for their individuality and personal qualities, instead
we have the community of Morlocks in The Time Machine, the
mysterious aliens of The War of the Worlds, the packs of mutant
creatures in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Usually these collectives
betray some affinity with the less desirable traits of the Victorian
society in which Wells came of age. Either they stand out for the
oppressiveness of their class structures or their imperialistic
tendencies or for some other aspect that would have been all too
familiar to Wells’s readers. It is to this author’s credit that he could
craft such well-paced adventures on the basis of so little
individualized villainy.
Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that the inhabitants of
the moon in this novel bear a strong resemblance to the insect
colonies of Earth. For this author, the most scary enemies are the
depersonalized ones. The hordes, the unnamed masses, the
mobs—these are what frighten H.G. Wells. Yet he portrays his
lunar society with such a sensitivity to its inner logic, that one
surmises that the novelist was both repelled and attracted by what
he was describing.
This emotional conflict is played out in human terms in the final
stages of Wells's plot. Our author's two protagonists take different
paths, one returning to Earth and the other staying on the Moon.
Normally this parting of the ways would indicate the conclusion of
the story, but Wells add a section in which Bedford, now back on
terra firma, receives messages from Cavor from across the void.
This coda feels disconnected to the previous part of the book, but
it does give Wells more scope to mull over issues of social and
political structure that he could hardly have developed in the
earlier chapters, where the conflicts and rapid pacing of the
narrative hardly allowed time for such musings.
Soon after its release, this book was criticized for the
implausibility of its scientific claims—by Jules Verne among
others. The Frenchman asked Wells to produce this mysterious
flying metal that defied the law of gravity. Yet if we made such
demands on all science fiction novels, there would be few left to
delight and astound us. For novelists, there is a more important
force than Newton’s laws—the power of the imagination. On this
scale, Wells stands out today, just as he did a century ago. He gave
us a story that, long after real men went to the real moon, still
exerts a gravitational pull of its own on countless readers.
This article was originally published on Blogcritics.
by H.G. Wells
by Ted Gioia
For as long as stories have been told, their narrators have
delighted in the possibility of traveling above the surface of the
Earth. When we recall the tale of Icarus, who suffered by soaring
too close to the sun, or hear the words of the psalmist—“Oh that I
had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away”—we recapture in
some degree the essence of this primitive longing. (Track down a
copy of the out-of-print study Voyages to the
Moon (1948) by Marjorie Hope Nicolson for
an expansive history of this literature.)
By the time we get to the works of Jules Verne
and H.G. Wells, these dreams are married to a
modern pride in technology and an unabashed
confidence in scientific advances. As such,
these authors created stories of a different
flavor, freed from the magical and mythical,
and married to a quasi-realistic narrative style.
Novels such as Verne’s From the Earth to the
Moon (1865) and Wells’s The First Men in the
Moon (1901) reveal, in a myriad of small ways,
that they were written by men who not only
dreamed about a lunar voyage, but who had some expectations
about its inevitability.
that film—ah, to be so lucky!—Fred MacMurray relied on flubber
to fly around in a levitated Model T Ford.
Wells has his own absent-minded professor, Dr. Cavor, who is the
inventor of this propulsion system that will send his (rocket-less)
ship to the moon. But the good doctor would hardly be able to put
his ideas into play without the assistance of his more practical and
business-minded neighbor Mr. Bedord. Think of them as the
Victorian equivalents of Wozniak and Jobs. Wells’s concept of
science seems to revolve around workshop eccentrics of this sort—
readers may recall that his “time machine” was also the invention
of a single individual tinkering away at home. Here again Verne is
more realistic in his comprehension that only a large-scale effort
by a huge team, well financed and with a broad range of skills,
could ever make a lunar expedition into a reality.
But if Wells is vague on his applied science, he makes up for it in
his storytelling skills. His narrator, the scheming Bedford, sets an
amusing tone from the outset. He is evading creditors and trying
to put together his life after a failed business venture. His interest
in his neighbor’s scientific theories is pecuniary, pure and simple,
and he dreams of corporate profits and royalty streams. He
constantly interrupts his account of the Moon trip to offer
threadbare excuses and exculpatory explanations for his venal
behavior. He is little better than a scoundrel, but a lovable one all
the same, if only for his persistence in self-justification. His
colleague Cavor is as idealistic as Bedford is mercenary, and Wells
makes use of this contrast in temperaments to impart some bite
and irony to their dialogues and dealings.
After a failed experiment that blows the top off Cavor’s cottage
and causes damage to nearby homesteads, the duo are ready for
their trip. Wells’s concept of the Moon is similar to his
prognostications about the future in The Time Machine. His
travelers encounter a lunar society, living underground, that is so
stratified and hierarchical, that the Age of Feudalism looks like a
hippie commune by contrast. This provides our author with a
platform for social commentary, but he doesn’t get as much
mileage here—certainly not as much as he is able to extract from
the fanciful scenarios of some of his other novels. Some readers,
however, may be grateful for the relatively small amount of
armchair philosophizing, which leaves plenty of room for fights,
escapes, close calls and other swashbuckling interludes.
Wells in this work—as in so many of his best known tales—sets up
a conflict between his protagonists and the amorphous
surrounding social forces. The villains in these stories are rarely
distinguished for their individuality and personal qualities, instead
we have the community of Morlocks in The Time Machine, the
mysterious aliens of The War of the Worlds, the packs of mutant
creatures in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Usually these collectives
betray some affinity with the less desirable traits of the Victorian
society in which Wells came of age. Either they stand out for the
oppressiveness of their class structures or their imperialistic
tendencies or for some other aspect that would have been all too
familiar to Wells’s readers. It is to this author’s credit that he could
craft such well-paced adventures on the basis of so little
individualized villainy.
Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that the inhabitants of
the moon in this novel bear a strong resemblance to the insect
colonies of Earth. For this author, the most scary enemies are the
depersonalized ones. The hordes, the unnamed masses, the
mobs—these are what frighten H.G. Wells. Yet he portrays his
lunar society with such a sensitivity to its inner logic, that one
surmises that the novelist was both repelled and attracted by what
he was describing.
This emotional conflict is played out in human terms in the final
stages of Wells's plot. Our author's two protagonists take different
paths, one returning to Earth and the other staying on the Moon.
Normally this parting of the ways would indicate the conclusion of
the story, but Wells add a section in which Bedford, now back on
terra firma, receives messages from Cavor from across the void.
This coda feels disconnected to the previous part of the book, but
it does give Wells more scope to mull over issues of social and
political structure that he could hardly have developed in the
earlier chapters, where the conflicts and rapid pacing of the
narrative hardly allowed time for such musings.
Soon after its release, this book was criticized for the
implausibility of its scientific claims—by Jules Verne among
others. The Frenchman asked Wells to produce this mysterious
flying metal that defied the law of gravity. Yet if we made such
demands on all science fiction novels, there would be few left to
delight and astound us. For novelists, there is a more important
force than Newton’s laws—the power of the imagination. On this
scale, Wells stands out today, just as he did a century ago. He gave
us a story that, long after real men went to the real moon, still
exerts a gravitational pull of its own on countless readers.
This article was originally published on Blogcritics.
Conceptual Fiction
Nonetheless, Wells—in stark
contrast to Verne, who
laboriously outlined the
technological details of how his
travelers were propelled to the
Moon—simply concocts a
phantasmagoric substance called
cavorite—an anti-gravity metal
that lets his explorers shoot off
into the stratosphere without any
need of fuel or engine or moving
parts. One is inevitably reminded
of “flubber” (a name created by
compressing the longer term
“flying rubber”), first introduced
to moviegoers in the 1961 Walt
Disney film The Absent-Minded
Professor. In case you missed
contrast to Verne, who
laboriously outlined the
technological details of how his
travelers were propelled to the
Moon—simply concocts a
phantasmagoric substance called
cavorite—an anti-gravity metal
that lets his explorers shoot off
into the stratosphere without any
need of fuel or engine or moving
parts. One is inevitably reminded
of “flubber” (a name created by
compressing the longer term
“flying rubber”), first introduced
to moviegoers in the 1961 Walt
Disney film The Absent-Minded
Professor. In case you missed