The First Men in the Moon
1901
The First Men in the Moon
1901
The First Men in the Moon is H.G. Wells at his most sardonic. Written in 1901, this novel takes the adventure story of lunar exploration and transforms it into something stranger and darker: a satirical portrait of a civilization that has perfected total organization, where every citizen is bred for a single purpose and individuality is literally foreign. When Bedford and Cavor crash-land on the moon, they discover not a silent wilderness but a vast underground metropolis of insect-like beings whose society makes Earth's industrial age look charmingly chaotic. Bedford, a greedy speculator, and Cavor, an idealistic scientist, make an unlikely pair. But when they encounter the Selenites, when they glimpse the terrible efficiency of the moon's inner world, their petty motives dissolve. The novel asks an unsettling question: what happens when you discover a society that has solved every problem except the ones that matter most? This is early science fiction doing what it does best: using the strange to illuminate the familiar, using the alien to hold a mirror to humanity.
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“So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.””
— H. G. Wells
“What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him and go he must.””
— H. G. Wells
“One can't always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.””
— H. G. Wells
“Over me, about me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal, that which was before the beginning and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence, - the infinite and final Night of space.””
— H. G. Wells
“Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then...Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while if I tell my secret, this planet to it's deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but this is certain...It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again-in a thousand years' time.””
— H. G. Wells
“What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do.””
— H. G. Wells
“He sighed and looked about him. 'This is no world for men,' he said. 'And yet in a way...it appeals.””
— H. G. Wells
“He showed it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living too much alone. This seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.””
— H. G. Wells
“It's this accursed science.... It's the very Devil. The medieval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it--and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons--now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!””
— H. G. Wells
