The First Men in the Moon by the English author H. G. Wells is a science fiction novel about a journey to the Moon by two Englishmen who discover that a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilisation of insect-like creatures ("Selenites") inhabits the lunar interior. The first-person narrator Mr. Bedford, a businessman, recounts his adventure with an eccentric scientist (Mr. Cavor), who has invented a gravity-blocking substance (cavorite) that the pair then use to construct a spherical spacecraft to reach the Moon, hoping to find valuable minerals. The work was originally serialised in The Strand Magazine (UK) and The Cosmopolitan (USA) from November 1900 to June 1901 and was published in hardcover book form in 1901. Wells called it one of his "fantastic stories".
The novel is a major work in the long history of the Moon in science fiction, which dates back to classical antiquity and includes earlier encounters with lunar beings and civilisations, often satirical in nature. The scientific inspiration in large part would come from Jules Verne and his book From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, which used a cannon shot to launch a spacecraft with a human crew, and the sequel Around the Moon in 1869 about the lunar journey and return to Earth—both works use the word "Selenites" to describe possible inhabitants of the Moon.
Underlying its scientific fantasy elements, the novel presents a dystopian satirical vision of an extremely regimented, intricately planned hierarchical society among the Selenites, divided into specialised roles in which individuals have strictly limited and predetermined lives for the good of the system. In the preface to the 1933 UK collected volume The Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells (published in different form as Seven Famous Novels in the US in 1934), Wells explained: "In The First Men in the Moon I tried an improvement on Jules Verne's shot, in order to look at mankind from a distance and burlesque the effects of specialisation". Comparable to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the book appears to be an introspective reductio of Wells' own eugenic and especially socialist ideals in favor of more nuanced versions.
The First Men in the Moon has been critically praised for its combination of action and adventure with social satire and criticism, enhanced by fully developed characters in Bedford and Cavor, elements of humor, and its vivid descriptions of unearthly places and alien beings.
Contents
Plot summary
The narrator is a London businessman named Bedford who withdraws to the countryside to write a play, by which he hopes to alleviate his financial problems. Bedford rents a small countryside house in Lympne, in Kent, where he wants to work in peace. He is bothered every afternoon, however, at precisely the same time, by a passer-by making odd noises. After two weeks Bedford accosts the man, who proves to be a reclusive physicist named Mr. Cavor. Bedford befriends Cavor when he learns he is developing a new material, cavorite, which can negate the force of gravity. Bedford sees in the commercial production of cavorite a possible source of "wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we fancied; we might own and order the whole world".
When a sheet of cavorite is prematurely processed, it makes the air above it weightless then shoots off into space, causing a violent, destructive windstorm in the local area. Bedford speculates that had the sheet of cavorite remained in place, the entire atmosphere of Earth could have been sucked up like a fountain and stripped from the planet, killing all life. Cavor hits upon the idea of a spherical spaceship made of "steel, lined with glass", and with sliding "windows or blinds" made of cavorite by which it can be steered, and persuades Bedford to help in the construction. Cavor suggests prospecting for valuable minerals on the Moon. Bedford sees an opportunity for huge wealth in developing a space travel business with cavorite-propelled spheres and liners, along with creating a monopoly on the mineral wealth of other planets. After reluctance with last minute doubts, he agrees to accompany Cavor on his voyage to the Moon. They pack oxygen and other supplies. On the way to the Moon, they experience weightlessness, which Bedford finds "exceedingly restful". Cavor is certain there is no life there.
On the surface of the Moon the two men discover a desolate landscape, but as the Sun rises, the thin, frozen atmosphere vaporises and strange plants begin to grow with extraordinary rapidity. Bedford and Cavor leave the capsule, but in romping about in the much lower gravity get lost in the rapidly growing jungle. They hear for the first time a mysterious booming coming from beneath their feet. They encounter "great beasts", "monsters of mere fatness", that they dub "mooncalves", and five-foot-high "Selenites" tending them. At first they hide and crawl about, but growing hungry partake of some "monstrous coralline growths" of fungus that inebriate them.
They wander drunkenly until they encounter a party of six extraterrestrials, who capture them. The insectoid lunar natives (referred to as "Selenites", after Selene, the Greek moon goddess) are part of a complex and technologically sophisticated society that lives underground, but this is revealed only in radio communications received from Cavor after Bedford's return to Earth.
Publication history
The story was originally serialised in The Strand Magazine (UK) and The Cosmopolitan (USA) from November 1900 to June 1901 and published in hardcover that same year. The first UK book edition (1901) was published by George Newnes Ltd (publisher of The Strand Magazine) in London, with illustrations by Claude Shepperson. The first US book edition (1901) was published by the Bowen-Merrill Company in Indiana, with illustrations by Emil Hering.
Influence on C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis explicitly stated that his science fiction books were both inspired by and written as an antithesis to those of H. G. Wells. Specifically, he acknowledged The First Men in The Moon to be "the best of the sort [of science fiction] I have read...." (from a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green).
The influence of Wells's book is especially visible in Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of Lewis's Space Trilogy. There, too, a central role in the story line is played by a partnership between a worldly businessman interested in the material gains from space travel (and specifically, in importing extraterrestrial gold to Earth) and a scientist with wider cosmic theories.
Also in Lewis's book, the two quietly build themselves a spaceship in the seclusion of an English country house, and take off into space without being noticed by the rest of the world. (It may be noted that both Wells and Lewis, like virtually all science fiction writers until the 1950s, grossly underestimated the resources needed for even the smallest jaunt outside Earth's gravitational field.) Like Wells's book, Lewis's reaches its climax with the Earth scientist speaking to the wise ruler of an alien world (in this case Oyarsa, the ruler of Malacandra/Mars) and blurting out the warlike and predatory nature of humanity.
However, in Lewis's book the businessman-scientist pair are the villains of the piece. Moreover, his scientist, Professor Weston, has a philosophy diametrically opposite to Cavor's, being an outspoken proponent of human colonisation of other planets, up to and including extermination of "primitive natives".
Other influences, references, and adaptations
Brian Stableford argues this is the first alien dystopia.
The character Jet Morgan takes a copy of the book along with him in the Journey into Space story, Journey to the Moon from 1953 and its 1958 re-recording, Operation Luna.
Cavorite was featured as a major plot device in the 1999 first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Cavor (given the first name of Selwyn) also appears in the volume and is mentioned in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century, the Selenites are featured as enemies of the nude lunar Amazons.
Cavorite also is used as a minor plot device in Warehouse 13, with its gravity blocking properties used by Wells to make a trap.
Cavorite and Cavor also play a major role in the end of Scarlet Traces: The Great Game, with the Selenites also briefly depicted.
The video game Voyage: Inspired by Jules Verne was based both on Wells's The First Men in the Moon, along with Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon.
Cavorite, Cavor, and the Selenites are a large factor in The Martian War, where Cavor's ship takes Wells, his wife, and T.H. Huxley first to the Moon, then to Mars. In the story, the Selenites have been enslaved by the Martians, used as food creatures and slaves to build the canals and invasion fleet.
The events of The First Men in the Moon are used as the precursor to the player's adventure in Larry Niven and Steven Barnes' "Dream Park" series adventure novel, The Moon Maze Game, which describes a fantasy role playing game being played on (and televised from) a crater and tunnels on the Moon.
An antigravity material called "cavorite" also appears in Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky.
Film adaptations
The First Men in the Moon has been adapted to film four times, and once prior to that as a mash-up Verne-Wells film:
A Trip to the Moon (1902) was released one year after the publication of Wells's book. Georges Sadoul regarded the film as a combination of two Jules Verne novels (From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon) plus adventures on the Moon taken from Wells's book. More recent scholarship, however, suggests that A Trip to the Moon draws on a wider variety of source materials, and it is unclear to what extent its filmmaker was familiar with Wells.
The first adaptation was made in 1919; the first film made from a science fiction novel.
The second adaptation was made in 1964, with Lionel Jeffries as Cavor and Edward Judd as Bedford. In this version Bedford has a fiancée, played by Martha Hyer, who also travels with the two men to the moon. The explorers wear diving suits as spacesuits, which they do not do in the original novel.
The third adaptation was broadcast on BBC Four in 2010. It was written by Mark Gatiss, who stars as Cavor, and Bedford is played by Rory Kinnear. This is the version most faithful to the novel.
The fourth adaptation, in 3D, by David Rosler, was in production from 2009 to 2010.
Audio adaptation
A 90-minute adaptation was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1981, dramatised by Terry James and with Willie Rushdon as Cavor and Hywell Bennett as Bedford. This adaptation was lost but later re-discovered by the Radio Circle and re-broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra in 2025 as part of a strand called "Hidden Treasures".
Reception and criticism
Soon after the publication of The First Men in the Moon, Wells was accused by the Irish writer Robert Cromie of having stolen from his novel A Plunge into Space (1890), which used an antigravity device similar to that in Chrysostom Trueman's The History of a Voyage to the Moon (1864). Both novels had certain elements in common, such as a globular spaceship built in secret after inventing a way to overcome Earth's gravity. Wells simply replied: "I have never heard of Mr Cromie nor of the book he attempts to advertise by insinuations of plagiarism on my part."
Jules Verne was publicly hostile to Wells's novel, mainly due to Wells having his characters go to the Moon via a totally fictional creation of an anti-gravitational material rather than the actual use of technology.
Wendy Graham reviewed First Men in the Moon for Adventurer magazine and stated that "On one level, it is a ripping SF adventure yarn, and on another it is a story about something which every SF fan has pondered - how do we react when we make that first encounter? One of the characters in the book wants to be friends, the other is the all-action type. Decide for yourself."