Subject: Review: H.G. Wells, THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

From: [email-masked] (John Anglin)
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 03:33:43 GMT

Wells, H.G.  "The First Men In The Moon".
     New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1967.  p176

Ref: MOON, SPACE TRAVEL, ANTIGRAVITY, ALIEN CONTACT,
     genetic engineering, utopia
     (Note: minor references not capitalized)

"Three thousand stadia from the Earth to the moon.  ... Marvel not,
my comrade, if I appear talking to you on super-terrestrial and
aerial topics.  The long and the short of the matter is that I am
running over the order of a Journey I have lately made."
- Lucian of Samosata (c120-180), Icaromenippus (in translation)

The following is a review/summary of H.G. Wells' novel "The First
Men In The Moon", which was first published in 1901.  The novel
hinges on the idea of a hollow, habitable moon and the discovery of
an antigravity substance as a means to travel there.  The Science
Fiction Encyclopedia remarks, "By the time the cosmic voyage began
to be taken seriously in the 19th century the possibility of there
being life on the Moon was already past credibility.  H.G. Wells
imagined a Selenite society within the Moon in The first Men in the
Moon (1901) but the setting here was no more than a convenient
literary device, a license taken out for the attempt to design the
first alien society.  Works contemporary with Wells share a rather
different image of the Moon as a place of ultimate desolation where
life, if it had ever existed, was long gone."  The Selenites are
described as roughly humanoid and insect-like in form, and their
utopian-style society is loosely based upon an ant or bee hierarchy
with hundreds of highly specialized variants.

"The Science Fiction Encyclopedia".  Ed. Peter Nicholls
     Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.  1979
     ISBN# 0-385-14743-0
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SYNOPSIS:

The narrator Mr. Bedford takes up residence at Lympne in Kent,
England in order to write a play and avoid creditors.  He soon
encounters Mr. Cavor, a stereotypic unworldly scientist
reminiscient of the Professor Calculus character in Herge's Tintin
cartoons.  "He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man,
with a jerky quality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his
extraordinary mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling
knickerbockers and stockings.  ... He gesticulated with his hands
and arms and jerked his head about and buzzed ... like something
electric." (p9)

Cavor is attempting to create a metal alloy with helium, which will
be "transparent" to gravitational forces (ie: an antigravity
substance).   Although scientifically inept, Bedford soon abandons
his playwriting attempt to assist with Cavor's work at the prospect
of financial gain.  After their first botched success on the 14th
of October 1899, which causes a terrific storm as the substance
rockets from the Earth's surface, they decide to build a sphere of
glass and steel with blinds made of Cavorite.  They are able to
travel to the moon in this device by opening the blinds in the
direction of the moon so that only its gravitational forces can act
upon them.  (Wells is able to describe the free-fall of zero
gravity remarkably accurately, with only the occasional error such
as slingshoting around the moon to pick up speed on the return
voyage with all the blinds closed.  He also imagines that lower
gravity would slow human metabolism while increasing relative
strength and that prolonged exposure to zero gravity would produce
dissociative delusions.) 

The two land successfully on the moon during the lunar night and
manage to survive the freezing cold using a small electric heater
inside their sphere.  When the roughly 336 hour day arrives, they
exit the sphere to discover fungus-cactus-like plant life rapidly
growing around them.  In their excitement at leaping around in low
gravity, they lose sight of the sphere among the now towering lunar
vegetation.  Their frantic search is intensified by the sight of a
diminutive leather-clad Selenite herding huge mooncalves: "... the
girth of its body was some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two
hundred.  ... I perceived that its gigantic flabby body lay along
the ground and that its skin was of corrugated white, dappling into
blackness along the backbone.  But of its feet we saw nothing.  I
think also that we saw then the profile at least of the almost
brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering,
omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes."
(p63-64)

Overcome by hunger and thirst, Bedford eventually eats a red
mushroom-like growth and the two of them become quite intoxicated
from it.  They discover a great portal into the moon and are
captured, in their intoxicated state, by Selenites.  They awaken in
gold chains and, after being fed some moon-calf meat, they are led
by their captors through various passageways.  Bedford balks at a
gangplank over a chasm and in the ensuing confrontation, the two
escape.  After a lengthy chase and a desperate, one-sided battle in
a moon-calf abbatoir, they reach the moon's surface again to
continue their search for the sphere.  They separate to increase
their chances and Bedford discovers the sphere, only to find that
Cavor has injured himself and been recaptured by the Selenites. 
With night approaching, Bedford re-enters the sphere and, in a
state of panic, begins the return journey to Earth alone.  He
manages to land against all odds quite near the point of their
departure, where he enlists the aid of some villagers to carry the
quantity of lunar gold he recovered to a nearby inn.  Meanwhile,
young village boy investigating the sphere disappears from the
Earth with it, causing another violent storm.

With his fortune in gold, Bedford sets himself up in Italy, under
the pseudonym "Wells", to publish the story of his journey and then
finally begins to write his play.  A letter from a Dutch
electrician, Mr. Julius Wendigee, informs him that Cavor is
intermittently broadcasting radio messages from the moon, however,
and he hurries to Wendigee's observatory on Monte Rosa.  The two of
them record and edit Cavor's messages for publication in a journal,
from which extracts are taken for the reader.  Cavor tells of his
re-capture by a different, more intelligent type of Selenites who
take him deep inside the moon to their cities around a luminescent
inner sea.  His subsequent messages describe his experiences in
Selenite society, including an interview with the Grand Lunar in
which he tries to explain the concept of democracy and the
mechanics of war.  Cavor's messages are increasingly disrupted by
radio jamming, but it is apparent that he has revealed the secret
of producing Cavorite to the Selenites even though he says there is
no helium on the moon.  His last transmission is abruptly cut off
as he tries to relay the formula to Earth and the secret of
Cavorite is thus irrevocably lost.

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SELENITES (alien insect-like inhabitants of the moon's interior)

H.G. Wells divides Selenite society into two main classes of
engineered beings, workers and intellectuals, within which are a
multitude of highly specialized variants.  "In the moon ... every
citizen knows his place.  He is born to that place, and the
elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he
undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither
ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it." (p157)  Workers are
drugged and sleep peacefully until needed.

The first encounters of Bedford and Cavor are with mooncalf herders
and guards from the worker class, which makes up the majority of
the population.  Bedford's description notes their soft
tentacle-like hands and skin that was "hard and shiny quite in the
beetle-wing fashion, not soft or moist or hairy as a vertebrated
animal's would be.  Along the crest of the head was a low ridge of
whitish spines running from back to front, and a much larger ridge
curved on each side over the eyes.  ... as their eyes were at the
sides and not in front one had the same difficulty in determining
the direction in which they were looking as on has in the case of
a hen or a fish.  They conversed with one another in their reedy
tones, nal arm as it were; one seemed all leg, poised ... on stilts;
another protruded an enormous nose-like organ beside a sharply
speculative eye that made him startlingly human until one saw his
expressionless mouth.  ... The strange and (except for the want of
mandibles and palps) most insect-like head of the mooncalf-minders
underwent astounding transformations; ...  There were several
brain-cases distended like bladders to a huge size.  ...  All about
me were eyes, faces, masks, tentacles, a leather noise like the
rustling of beetle wings, and a great bleating and twittering of
Selenite voices." (p152-153)

The intellectual class, distinguished primarily by their enlarged
heads, are further subdivided into administrators, specialized
experts, and the "erudite, who are the repositories of all
knowledge" (p158).  Cavor notes, "There are no books, no records of
any sort, no libraries, nor inscriptions.  All knowledge is stored
in distended brains much as the honey-ants of Texas store honey in
their distended abdomens.  ... some of the profounder scholars are
altogether too great for locomotion, and are carried from place to
place in a kind of sedan tub, wabbling jellies of knowledge that
enlist my respectful astonishment." (p158)  One might compare such
beings with the Regul elders in C.J. Cherryh's Faded Sun Trilogy. 
The literal head of this society is the Grand Lunar, a "little
dwarfed body ... shrivelled and white" (p166) whose "brain-case
must have measured many yards in diameter" (p165).  The extremely
large brain is constantly sprayed and cooled with water.

The following excerpt shows two examples from the intellectual
class, while describing the classic language barrier in any contact
with aliens:

"The manner in which Phi-oo and Tsi-puff attacked the problem of
speech was fairly obvious.  They came into this 'hexagonal cell' in
which Cavor was confined, and began imitating every sound he made,
beginning with a cough.  He seems to have grasped their intention
with great quickness, and to have begun repeating words to them and
pointing to  by drawings; some adjectives were easy, but when it came to
abstract nouns, to prepositions, and the sort of hackneyed figures
of speech by means of which so much is expressed on earth, it was
like diving in cork jackets.  Indeed, these difficulties were
insurmountable until to the sixth lesson came a fourth assistant,
a being with a huge, football-shaped head, whose forte was clearly
the pursuit of intricate analogy.  ... It seemed long and yet very
brief -- a matter of days before [he] was positively talking with
these insects of the moon." (p154-155)

%A Wells, H.G.
%T The First Men In The Moon
%I Berkley Publishing Corporation
%C New York
%D 1967
%G No ISBN
%P pb, 176pp
%K moon, space travel, antigravity, alien contact

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John Anglin, [email-masked]

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading
the old ones." - Joseph Joubert
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