Contents
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of H. G. Wells
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
Explanatory Notes
Introduction
Readers who are unfamiliar with the plot may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.
H. G. Wells’s Fantastic Science
The first publication of The First Men in the Moon, in monthly instalments from December 1900 to August 1901 in the Strand Magazine, marked a significant moment in history, as the telling of the story began in one century and ended in another. Literary critic J. L. Cranfield shrewdly observes that ‘The reader who took in The First Men in the Moon in its original form began the novel as a nineteenth-century Victorian and ended it as a twentieth-century Edwardian.’1 In an often quoted conceit from the 1917 novel The Soul of a Bishop, Wells remembers the turn of the century thus: ‘Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people’s ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.’2 (The April 1901 issue of the Strand sees, alongside an instalment of The First Men in the Moon, a profile of the recently deceased Queen Victoria.)
While H. G. Wells had a writing career that lasted for over fifty years, he remains best known today for the four scientific romances he wrote in its very earliest, most imaginative years: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). When writing his Victorian romances, Wells was often in poor health and uncertain about what his own place would be in history. By the 1900s, however, he became simultaneously more optimistic and more pessimistic in imagining the world’s possible futures: optimistic for what could be achieved with greater cooperation and more advanced technology, and pessimistic about the dangerous consequences if humanity failed to take advantage of these opportunities. Wells was acutely and — as his long career went on — increasingly aware of the pace of historical change, and of the place that his own work might play in shaping future changes. At the time at which he began to write The First Men in the Moon, he saw the dawn of the new century as a turning point, from which either progress or catastrophe were imaginable possibilities.
The representation of imaginary technology in particular gives Wells the opportunity to show humanity either progressing further or extinguishing itself entirely. The potential for technology to destroy, if it fails to renew, the world, is a consistent theme in Wells. The First Men in the Moon’s eccentric and modest boffin Cavor achieves space flight through building a sphere made out of ‘Cavorite’, a material which cuts off the force of gravitation in the same way that different kinds of matter can screen the effects of light, heat, or X-rays.3 Great as this discovery is, when Wells’s fiction shows scientific research being carried out by individuals rather than the state, the results are often calamitous. When Cavor first makes his anti-gravity compound, he very nearly accidentally depopulates the earth: only the direction in which the first piece of Cavorite happens to be pointed prevents the entire atmosphere being sucked into space. Cavor and his fellow protagonist Bedford acknowledge the importance of ‘the purest accident’ (p. 5) in their success: as Bedford puts it, ‘First one fluky start then another’ (p. 77); Cavorite is ‘made at last by accident when Cavor least expected it’ (p. 18). Reproving themselves for failing to take into account the weight of air when inventing an antigravity device, they reflect that ‘this shows you how useless knowledge is unless you apply it’ (p. 21).
For new knowledge to be applied most usefully, Wells’s social and political writing recommends, science should be governed by the State, ideally a World State, and not by lone eccentric geniuses inattentive to the possible consequences of their experiments. While Cavor is significantly more endearing than the book’s other narrator-protagonist (the caddish Bedford) it is nonetheless a chilling moment when Cavor brushes off the presumed deaths of his assistants at this moment of creation as ‘no great loss’ (p. 22). In works that sketched Wells’s ideal vision of how the world should best take care of its inhabitants and its science, such as A Modern Utopia (1905), scientific research is carried out collaboratively for the common good of humanity, in laboratories sponsored by an imagined utopian world government. While critics such as George Orwell accused Wells of being a technocrat, unthinkingly marching in step with scientific progress, in fact Wells’s fantastic texts frequently show the appalling consequences when new technology is not overseen and used properly.4 The War in the Air (1908), for example, portrays the effects of political development failing to keep pace with technological development: nation states fail to resolve their differences by diplomatic means, and the invention of powered flight results in a devastating aerial war which reduces civilization back to the level of the Iron Age. The Time Traveller, in The Time Machine, goes on a second journey and never comes back; the eponymous villain of The Island of Doctor Moreau is murdered by his own Beast-men, and Griffin, the Invisible Man, by a mob of angry villagers. These scientist figures also fail to share their discoveries with others, or to publish them, and as a consequence of this neglect their discoveries never benefit anybody else. Similarly, in The First Men in the Moon, Cavor is trapped on the moon, and the boy Tommy Simmons (named after a real-life childhood friend of Wells) steals the sphere; consequently, the invention of Cavorite and all its benefits for humankind, including the possibility of interplanetary travel, are lost for ever.
Composition, Publication, and Reception
The figure of Cavor himself was at the heart of Wells’s original conception for the book, which was originally intended to be ‘a series of
