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.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 