Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

The Story So Far

Bedford and Cavor are a failed businessman and an eccentric scientist respectively, who strike up an unlikely friendship and business partnership. Cavor, being the inventor, perfects a metal of his own design which he christens Cavorite, while Bedford orchestrates the construction (not the invention, of course) of a giant metal sphere which takes advantage of this anti-gravity metal called Cavorite. To test the viability of this new metal, after an accident gets nearly the both of them killed, Cavor and Bedford agree (reluctantly on Bedford’s part) to take this big metal ball to the moon. They pack some provisions, although strangely (from a modern standpoint) it doesn’t occur to them to build pressure suits for a world which very well might not even have an atmosphere. But of course, in the year 1899, it was speculated that the moon might not only have an atmosphere, but be home to life of its own. And so it does here.

Of course, nearly everything that could go wrong does, short of the two men dying straightaway. They lose track of the sphere, finding that it had been stolen or sunken into the landscape. They eventually battle hunger and thirst, although due to the lower gravity it takes longer for their bodily functions to call upon them. The biggest issue becomes the moon’s indigenous intelligent race, a bunch of “ant-men,” some of whom are man-sized, and somewhat humanoid, but otherwise have nothing in common with the men. These aliens, which Cavor comes to call Selenites, live in a complex network of underground caverns, and since the plant life on the moon isn’t useful for crafting wood-based equipment, Selenite civilization is metal-based, the moon apparently being rich in metals. At the end of the second installment Bedford and Cavor decide to split up in search of the sphere, leaving a handkerchief as a landmark.

Enhancing Image

The plan doesn’t go well at all, although the bright side is that Bedford finds the sphere and is able to leave the moon, albeit without Cavor. Unfortunately the two will never see each other again, although this is not the last time they hear from each other. In what I can only think of as a major contrivance, Bedford lands in the UK, in the seaside town of Littlestone, which is quite lucky for him. He loses the sphere again, for the last time it seems, but he’s able to make some money off of publishing the story of his and Cavort’s journey to the moon. (Funnily enough Bedford’s story appears in The Strand Magazine, which is also where The First Men in the Moon first appeared in the UK.) Normally this would be where the story (as in this novel) ends, but eventually a scientist by the name of Julius Wendigee, a Dutchman living in Britain, “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,” picks up coded messages from the moon. Bedford gets in on this, having hitherto assumed Cavor was dead, seeing that his former buddy is not only alive but in contact with the Selenites. This is good news!

The back end of the novel is a series of transcripts of Cavor explaining Selenite culture and biology, among other things. Bedford effectively disappears as a character while Cavor takes control, relating his story to us like the unnamed protagonist does in The Time Machine. I must admit that these last few chapters are my favorite part of the book, which is a shame considering that, by Bedford’s own admission, the story had already come to an end in one sense, but also it feels like too little and too late. We learn important details about life for the Selenites that we really should’ve been given insight to earlier in the book, since up this point they came off as generic hostile aliens. The novel is at its best when it stops being an adventure narrative and instead swerves into territory Wells is better with, namely speculation on the future of human civilization. Cavor is led into an impossibly grand hall and introduced to the ruler of the Selenites, the Grand Lunar, an immobile mass of flesh whose brain is literally several yards across. (Intelligence among the Selenites is determined by the size of their heads, at the cost of body strength and mobility. This is something that became a cliche in pulp-era SF, but it was not so in Wells’s time.) It’s here that we finally get what the point of the book seems to be—a point that Wells had rather neglected to explore up till now.

There’s a big case of culture clash between the humans (or at least humanity as told by Cavor) and Selenites, indeed every facet of culture there is. The Selenites, in keeping with their insectoid appearance, are a race of specialized workers with a single absolute ruler, although the Grand Lunar represents supreme intelligence rather than supreme fertility like a queen bee. There’s no war here, nor does there seem to be poverty. Despite their reliance on metal, the Selenites are pre-industrials. The evil and filth of Victorian England has not reached them. Unfortunately, in trying to describe life on Earth, Cavor can’t help but yap about the nastier parts of human nature and act as if these are just things one ought to expect, namely the human tendency to wage war. This understandably concerns the Selenites, and Cavor’s fate is left ambiguous, although it doesn’t look good for him. Regardless, we never hear from Cavor again. There’s an anti-war slant crammed into the climax of the novel, which I can’t help but take as hypocritical on Wells’s part, considering he would later support British involvement in World War I. (Wells was, among other things, a hypocrite: he was a womanizer, even fathering a child out of wedlock, while at the same time being prudish about sex in literature, like the good Victorian gentleman he was.) The climax is good on its own, but if only the rest of the novel had properly built up to it.

A Step Farther Out

When C. S. Lewis wrote Out of the Silent Planet he intended it as a not-very-subtle rebuke of Wells’s writing, and The First Men in the Moon in particular. For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of either novel. I don’t think The First Men in the Moon plays to Wells’s strengths, for the most part. It’s a weirdly structured thing that feels lopsided and at times bloated, despite coming to only about 200 pages in paperback. It’s a simple idea that could’ve worked better had it been the length of The Time Machine, or even The Invisible Man. Wells, who was never one to hide his beliefs, is less didactic here than in those other novels, but I wish he maybe didn’t bury the lede with what he wanted to say. The First Men in the Moon is actually less didactic than Lewis’s novel, but that’s not really a positive for the former. Maybe I would like it more had I read it as a book, in a short burst of time, rather than stretch it out over a few weeks, but I’m not sure.

See you next time.

The Story So Far

Bedford is an aspiring playwright and a failed businessman who strikes up an unlikely friendship with the scientist Cavor. Bedford is working on a play whilst licking some financial wounds and Cavor has been trying to perfect a metal of his own design, so that each man has been struggling with his own goals. Their friendship takes on a business aspect, with Bedford basically acting as Cavor’s manager while the latter messes around with the elements and God knows what. Because this novel is narrated from Bedford’s perspective and because Bedford himself is not a scientist at all, the details of how Cavorite is perfected are rather sketchy. It’s a combination of metals that works like helium, despite being solid, in that it has an anti-gravity effect. The accidental perfecting of this man-made element results in a cyclone that damn near kills Our Heroes™, but the good news is that it works. The question then becomes what to do with Cavorite. Mind you Wells wrote the novel around 1899, the years it takes place, so airplanes were just a little bit off in the future, with hot air balloons being up to this point the only practical way man could take flight.

Cavor gets the “brilliant” notion to not only construct a giant metal sphere made partly of Cavorite, but to test it by flying himself and Bedford to the moon. Thus our means of getting to the moon is not via rocket ship, or even like Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon where we’re shot out of a cannon, but what amounts to an anti-gravity metal sphere. How these two Englishmen plan on getting back to Earth, let alone England, remains to be seen. When they land on the moon they find that the air is breathable, if also taking some getting used to, and that there is plant life here at the very least—albeit plant life of an exotic sort. The gravity is also only a fraction of Earth’s, which Bedford struggles with. And yet despite the breathable atmosphere there doesn’t seem to be any alien life possessing anything like human intelligence… at least so far.

Enhancing Image

The second installment opens with Bedford and Cavor actually stepping out of the sphere and getting a whiff of that comparatively thin moon air. I need not tell the reader (but I will) that aside from the lower gravity, the moon in Wells’s novel is completely different from the moon as we know it—so different that it may as well be a fantasy realm. What was scientifically plausible in 1901 was very much not so even a few decades later, never mind in 2026. If The First Men in the Moon suffers from anything, aside from being heavier on the adventure elements than Wells’s more iconic novels, it’s not being nearly as plausible as The Time Machine or The Island of Dr. Moreau. Granted that all science fiction is founded on at least one big lie (and more likely several lies in concert), The First Men in the Moon now almost reads more like fantasy than SF. It’s more scientifically grounded than Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels, but not by a whole lot. What’s interesting is how the atmosphere and gravity affect Bedford and Cavor’s sense of time and even hunger, with them realizing after a while that they’d not eaten in hours, yet don’t feel like they’re starving. It’s also easy (and fun) to traverse the moon by jumping around. The only problem (well, the first problem) is that they at some point lose track of the sphere.

It takes nearly halfway through the novel, but it does live up to its title. I said that the moon here is radically different from how it is in real life, another difference being that the moon here has a vast network of underground tunnels. Not only is the moon alive, with plants and “mooncalves” to serve as livestock, but there is indeed a race of intelligent beings here. The Selenites are about man-sized and bipedal, but insectoid. More to the point, there’s no overlap in language between the Englishmen and the aliens, except maybe basic body language. The Selenites don’t intend to kill them, at least not right away, instead taking them prisoner and holding them in this underground cavern. This isn’t quite as cool as it sounds. It could be because Bedford and Cavor, while being eccentric (especially the latter), are not natural-born adventurers like John Carter or Conan, but much of the conflict in this stretch of the novel comes down to Our Heroes™ bickering with each other rather than working together to fight their captors. Not that there’s anyone else around to converse with. Even the human cast of The Time Machine is bigger, by virtue of the framing narrative. Something I’ve just noticed about protagonists in Wells’s stories, be it his novels or short stories, is that a) they’re not given to introspection, b) they’re reacting to strange happening, rather than causing them, and c) they’re always dudes, without fail. When I say “protagonist” I also mean the narrator, since there tends to be a secondary character, the deuteroganist, who acts rather than reacts. Cavor is thus the deuteroganist to Bedford’s protagonist.

A Step Farther Out

Wells was not known for writing long novels, but even being about the same length as The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon feels smaller in scale and less intellectual. We’re two thirds of the way in and the Selenites are still mostly a mystery. I can’t help but feel like this novel is missing something Wells’s best novels have, although I can’t quite put my finger on it. I’m gonna wait until the final stretch to pass judgment, but this is not looking to be one of my favorites of his. Oh well.

See you next time.

Who Goes There?

Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 and died in 1946, meaning he lived to see both World Wars, as well as the dropping of the first nuclear bombs. By the end of his life he came to believe humanity was in a pretty sorry state, but for much of his career he could be considered an optimist. He was an early advocate for Darwin’s theory of evolution and was what we’d now call a democratic socialist, both of these beliefs playing major roles in his fiction writing. While he wrote essays and articles prolifically, and wrote quite a bit of non-genre fiction, it’s his SF that secured his legacy. Between 1895 and 1901 alone he either invented or codified multiple subgenres of SF, between a handful of novels and a fair number of short stories. That his output became increasingly sporadic and lacking in vitality after that point is a relatively small price to pay, given the heights of his major work. He’s arguably the most important SF writer to ever live, even taking into account authors who wrote SF before him, such as Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. The First Men in the Moon was first published in book form in 1901 and is perhaps Wells’s last major novel, although he did write some very good short stories after this point.

Starting my Amazing Stories run with a reprint might seem odd for those who are not in the know, but reprints played a big role in the first years of that magazine’s history. Hugo Gernsback quickly became infamous for not paying his writers in a timely fashion, and the original work he received was often of pretty dire quality anyway. Therefore, reprints of classic (from the perspective of the 1920s) SF sounded like a logical choice. The relationship between Gernsback and Wells eventually soured, but it’s hard to come across an early issue that doesn’t feature a Wells short story or novel in serial form. There was a generation of young readers who, lacking in hardcover books, associated Wells with Amazing Stories and those colorful Frank R. Paul covers, and that’s not a bad thing.

Placing Coordinates

First serialized from 1900 to 1901 in The Cosmopolitan and The Strand Magazine, in the US and UK respectively. It was first published in book form in 1901. It was serialized in Amazing Stories from December 1926 to February 1927. Obviously it’s still very much in print, but because it’s public domain it’s also on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Wells is famous for a lot of things, but his protagonists (except maybe the unnamed hero of The Time Machine) are not among them. Here we have Mr. Bedford, a businessman who’s recently come into hard times by way of bankruptcy. He’s the narrator of this story, but it’s hard to call him a hero; on the bright side, he’s at least affable. Bedford’s chosen to put his money issues aside for the moment and concentrate on writing a play. During this retreat he has a series of encounters with Mr. Cavor, who turns out to be an eccentric scientist. Cavor is mildly and passively annoying, and when Bedford makes this known to him Cavor threatens to buy his bungalow. The two men come to an understanding, though, and even start a business relationship that might evolve into friendship. It’s a case of how opposites might attract, since Bedford is “practical” and business-minded while Cavor, despite being highly intelligent, has yet to make much of a living off of his inventions. His latest invention might prove profitable, though, being an artificial element called Cavorite, which is missing an ingredient. The making of Cavorite is rather vague, with Bedford, himself far from being a scientist, not knowing “the particulars” of its final (and accidental() making. The basic idea is that Cavorite is an anti-gravity amalgamation of metals, in that it’s like helium but a solid rather than a gas. It’s worth mentioning that Wells wrote The First Men in the Moon just prior to the first modern plane taking flight, and the novel itself is set at the very end of the Victorian era. The only practical way a man could take flight in 1899 was with the hot air balloon, which of course is mentioned.

Also mentioned is Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, which in case you don’t know involves a bunch of adventurers building a huge fucking gun and firing themselves out of it, their capsule being like a bullet. It’s pretty hard to take seriously nowadays, not that Wells’s solution to the moon problem is much better. Cavorite is a made-up element that may as well be magic, and the ship the two men (with the help of some laborers) build is a sphere made partly of this element. It’s not really a rocket ship, but rather an anti-gravity ship. Maybe the most unserious part is that Bedford and Cavor are not astronauts, which goes without saying, but also they don’t bring any equipment that even a child nowadays would understand as required for space travel. No pressure suits in this novel. The men also don’t experience the ill effects of low or zero gravity. We really didn’t know anything about our moon in 1899, did we? There’s speculation that the moon might have a breathable atmosphere (it doesn’t) and even life (not that either). Of course, since this is a Wells novel, the air is perfectly breathable and some of the first things we see are flowers indigenous to the moon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.

It’s hard to spoil this novel, since even having not read it before I’m aware of the general trajectory of its plot. We wait until nearly a third into it to witness the revelation of life on the moon, but this fact is made apparent even on the covers of some modern editions. Like with Wells’s other famous works, it suffers nowadays from seeming too familiar, although not to the level of, say, The War of the Worlds. It doesn’t help that Wells is big on using archetypes for his characters, so that Bedford and Covar are about one step above the level of cardboard. The stakes are also low, or at least so it appears at this point, since Our Heroes™ only decide to journey to the moon as a sensational way of testing the sphere. You may then be wondering what the appeal of reading Wells in [the current year] might be, if the science is laughably outdated and his characters lack the dimensions found in the works of Wells’s more literary contemporaries. The secret is that Wells, at his best or even just close to it, is a pretty engrossing storyteller. Wells is like his close contemporaries Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, in that a) he wrote a fair amount of SF and horror, and b) he had a knack for titillating the reader’s imagination. Despite not much happening in terms of plot with this opening installment, I did read most of it with ease.

There Be Spoilers Here

Well, they do land in the moon, or rather on it.

A Step Farther Out

Funny thing about reading this novel and Wells generally is how one can see his influence on other authors pretty readily, be it on Robert Heinlein or Michael Crichton. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the anti-gravity sphere here was an influence on the reality-warping chamber in Crichton’s Sphere.) As with Wells’s other major novels it can also be better understood as adventure fiction than SF of the more serious/modern sort, even if those authors partly got their game from Wells. The question then is, what happens next? We’ve technically already made first contact, but surely there will be aliens that can converse with a couple of Englishmen.

See you next time.