First Men in the Moon
Seventy years before Armstrong, H.G. Wells sent two Englishmen to the Moon. Mr. Bedford, a struggling writer desperate for money, teams with the brilliant recluse Dr. Cavor to test his impossible invention: cavorite, a substance that defies gravity. They climb into a spherical craft and launch themselves into space. What they find there is not the dead rock astronomers expected, but a vast underground network of tunnels housing the Selenites, an ancient insect civilization ruled by absolute hierarchy. Bedford panics and escapes to Earth. Cavor stays behind, fascinated. But when radio transmissions from the Moon abruptly cease, Wells poses an unsettling question: what if the Selenites erased every trace of humanity's presence? This is speculative fiction at its most thrilling: a tale of first contact wrapped in Victorian anxiety about progress, class, and whether we would even recognize intelligence vastly different from our own.
X-Ray
