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.