Very Belated Book Review: THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
I finally got around to reading this HG Wells’ classic THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. It is a short book and in the public domain, so it is easy to get a hold of, and easy to read.
We have entered the Second Age of Science Fiction. In the First Age, all science fiction was fiction, and the future was a blank page. In the Second Age, the page is overwritten with real events, none of which were correctly expected. Science Fiction of the Second Age carries with it a long history of discarded prophecies, what are called “retrofutures”, were we can look back and see what were our grandfathers’ meditations (literal or figurative) about their future. These are not exactly alternate history, nor do they fit the old definition of science fiction as fiction set in a possible future. The mood most likely provoked by old science fiction is one of nostalgia, melancholy facing the past, which, ironically, is the precise opposite of the mood they were meant to provoke, wonder facing the future. Reading Orwell’s NINETEEN-EIGHTY FOUR is simply a different experience for an audience circa 1948, when the Labour Party was in the ascendant in England, as opposed to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON was published in 1901, six decades before the real moon landing, and I read it in 2009, four decades after the last moon landing. The tale was not scientifically feasible even when written, nor, to be fair, was it meant to be: it was a figurative rather than literal mediation on the future.
The plot consists of failed businessman Bedford, who is staying in the country, hiding from creditors, trying to write a play. He meets absentminded scientist Cavor, who is developing a metal, Cavorite, an alloy of helium, that blocks all gravity waves, nullifying the attraction of Earth. The two contrive a glass sphere fitted with venetian blinds of the material, which allows them to cut off Earthly gravity while allowing Lunar gravity to attract them.
After an eerie passage across the abyss of space, they land on the Moon, which is imaginatively described as possessing a frozen atmosphere. The atmosphere thaws each dawn, and abundant fast-growing plantlife springs up with astonishing speed from seed dropped during the previous lunar day—a period of roughly two weeks.
Bedford opens the valve of the sphere—there is no airlock nor other precautions—and emerges into an atmosphere not only breathable, but only about as thin as on a mountaintop. The lightness of Lunar gravity allows the men go sailing on long leaps through the rapidly-growing jungle. The jungle covers the sphere and they lose sight of it.
The pair, starving, ingests a strange moon fungus, which turns out to be hallucinogenic. While giddy, they are captured by an insectoid race dwelling beneath the lunar surface, dubbed Selenites, and wake in a dark cell chained up in fetters of gold. Over Cavor’s objection, they fight their captors, killing dozens of the frail beings, and escape to the surface. The dusk is falling, which promises death, since the lunar atmosphere freezes at night. The pair splits up to search for the missing sphere. Bedford finds the sphere but loses Cavor. In an agony of haste, he seeks his missing partner while the snows of sunset begin to cover the lunar world. He finds a hastily scribbled note left by Cavor, who was recaptured by Selenites.
Cavor returns to the Earth, fortunately landing at a British seaside resort. He is rescued by vacationers, but unwisely leaves the sphere open and unwatched on the shore behind him. A small boy enters the sphere, works the control, and is shot into space and killed. Bedford, meanwhile, still has in his possession the chains and the crowbar taken from the Selenites, which are of solid gold: so his fortune is made.
Bedford, later, discovers that a Dutch scientist received Morse code wireless signals from Cavor in the moon, where he was treated as a guest by the Selenites, who learned English, showing him their blue-lit cavern world with its ocean core, and allowing him to construct a radio-wave apparatus. Cavor describes his meeting with ‘The Grand Lunar’ a creature composed of absurdly oversized brain with a tiny face and body dangling beneath, and the Grand Lunar’s incredulous questions betray the same kind of contempt for mankind as Gulliver’s master the Houyhnhnm in similar circumstances. The Grand Lunar decides to cut off contact with the Earth, and Cavor’s transmission is interrupted; Cavor’s ultimate fate unknown.
Let me say what was anachronistic, good, bad, and unexpected about this work.
Anachronisms first. The scene where the two men undog the airtight hatch of their glass sphere, hear the air hissing out (because the air pressure on the Moon is as thin as atop the Andes Mountains) but then throw the hatch open and emerge wearing nothing thicker than a shirt, strikes the modern reader is simply ridiculous. One is reminded of the scene in the comedy GALAXY QUEST, when the comedy-relief guy flings open the shuttle craft hatch and tests to the see if the atmosphere is breathable by sniffing it.
This may not be an anachronism, because the author seems bent on displaying his characters as the most rash and incompetent explorers of all time, as when they moon-bounce away from their space-traveling sphere and lose it, or as when they stuff moon-fungus into their mouths, and are lucky enough to suffer nothing worse than intoxication. Roald Amundsen would never have done things like that. These guys are idiots. (Of course Bedford and Cavor did not have Amundsen’s example before them. Amundsen did not reach the Pole until a decade after their moonflight.)
I need hardly mention that the lunar landscape of Wells, with its nightly frozen atmosphere and daily growing fungi, is also an anachronism. The moon of Wells is hollow, and its core is filled with an ocean infested with luminous microbes, a glowing sea. At the moon turns, vast winds pass from the hot sunward side to the cold night side through galleries and caverns that riddle the lunar core. The Selenite civilization is gathered at the core, and only the herdsmen and lesser orders dwell near the surface. These herdsmen close, with echoing clangs, the vast metal doors and valves which shut out the cliffs and pits and craters of the surface world at sunset, when all life dies. Anachronism or not, this is a magnificent conception, and an eerie little world indeed.
From a scientific point of view, the hollowness of the Moon’s globe is introduced to explain its low density (it is 1/4 the Earth’s diameter, but 1/6 the surface gravity). The theory that the Moon was broken away from the Earth, and therefore has much the same chemical composition, is mentioned (perhaps) to explain the compatible atmosphere, foodstuffs, etc.
I will not list the antigravity metal as an anachronism, because even the science of the time would have regarded such a thing as fantastic.
However, given the fantasy premise, the author plays fair with the science fictional conclusions. When Cavor develops a flat plate of the material in his cottage, the whole cylindrical volume of air above the plate becomes weightless, and the surrounding air, still possessed of weight, rushes in and lifts the plate with a pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch of pressure, flinging the plate, and the air above it, up out of the atmosphere in a huge fountain. Cavor’s roof explodes as if from the shock of a cannon ball. This is a perfectly fine conclusion to the thought-experiment of what would happen if a flat plate of metal could block gravity waves.
Likewise, the author has his two space travelers not only weightless inside the sphere as it flies, but also drawn together, them and their gear, into the center point of the sphere, due to the gravitational attraction of the objects in weightlessness to each other.
The low gravity of the moon is correctly described, and, unlike the thoughtless science fiction of television and movies, the author never forgets the effects, such as lesser air pressure. He even includes such nuanced details such as the ramps of the Selenites are steeper than Earthly stairs need be. One Selenite carries what looks like a parasol, but is actually a parachute, since to fall down a wellshaft on the moon is safe enough, even with a relatively small canopy of parachute to break the fall, due to the lighter gravity.
The author is also imaginative enough to suppose that other physiological and psychological effects would accompany weightless passage through space. For example, his travelers both feel no hunger, and have no need to eat or sleep, while in the sphere. No explanation is supposed or speculated for this: it is merely to lend an unearthly atmosphere to the events.
On his lonely trip back from the moon, Bedford suffers an hallucination akin to a religious experience, where he sees himself and his troubles as minute, as if seen from outside, detached from any interest, as if an eternal being as untroubled as the gods of Lucretius were merely “peering into the material world using Bedford as a keyhole.” Strangely, this psychological effect (or affect) of space travel is uncannily accurate. Certain astronauts (Edgar Mitchell most famously) report a similar experience of euphoria or transcendental detachment when in space.
The science in this scientific romance by Wells is inferior, of course, to the more realistic speculations of Jules Verne, but the imagination shown in the details mentioned above is science fiction at its finest. The romance in this scientific romance is also superb: the Moon of Wells, if anything, is even more unearthly than the real moon, and the stark images of looming lunar cliffs, dark shafts piercing the faceless interior, the deadly frozen atmosphere, the weird dawn across lifeless sands, the sudden riot of weird alien fungi, the lumbering moon-beasts, and swarming and grotesque insect-men, all conspire to create a striking piece of gothic atmosphere. And we will never know what became of poor Cavor.
For its bad points, I can voice no complaint aside from those justly leveled against nearly every science fiction writer everywhere: the characters are not well drawn. This is hardly a flaw in science fiction, as character development is secondary. Nonetheless, even in quite simple books, there is supposed to be some sort of character arc: compare Bedford on the Moon, for example, with Ransom on Malacandra in C.S. Lewis’s attempt at Wellsianscientific romance OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET. Ransom suffers a change of attitude, a growth; he learns something.
Bedford is much the same before and after his adventure, and not a very appealing character in any case. When the little boy dies in the sphere Bedford foolishly left unattended and open on the beach after his rescue, Bedford pretends to know nothing of the death, so that the boy’s parents can merely never learn of their missing child’s fate, and be tormented by false hopes and uncertainty. I cannot tell if this was by craft of the author, or by an oversight. Perhaps Wells merely wanted the glass sphere quickly destroyed, so as not to upset the story by having the logically necessary return expedition to save Cavor.
A second flaw is the author’s decision to have the main episode of interest (interesting to this reader, at least), namely, the meeting with an alien intelligence, entirely offstage. In terms of plot, Bedford’s story comes to an end, and then we have three chapters, told in fragments second-hand, of Cavor’s adventures inside the hollow Moon, meeting the true and civilized Selenites of the deeper interior, seeing the fantastic sights of their advanced civilization, and having a personal audience with the monarch of that unearthly sphere. I can see why the author make the choice he did (it allows a summary of what might be tedious, for one reason, and allows a droll contrast between Cavor’s point of view with Bedford’s) but it still comes across as awkward, a disjoint of two stories.
None of these flaws are fatal, or even major, and a reader absorbed into the story would not notice them.
What was unexpected was how subtle that story was. You know the kind of thing I mean. An unsubtle story deliberately paints things in black and white with sharp distinctions between the two: there is no ambiguity, for example, between Ransom and Weston in OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET as to which is the bad guy. The inhibiters of Mars are unambiguously divine prelapsarian beings, children of an Adam which knew no Fall. Weston is a black hat from the blackest of hat stores: indeed, in the sequel, he is the devil himself. Ransom is not just a good guy, in the sequel he is divinely anointed a la King Arthur as the sacred champion of heaven.
The Moon creatures of Wells are more ambiguous. While Cavor expresses the kind of socialist piety we come to expect from European intellectuals from a century ago (for example, expressing how scientific and rational it is for the Selenites to breed their workers for specific tasks, or drug unemployed workers into comatose stupor until they are again needed), he also recoils from the horror of such a scientifically organized totalitarianism (for example, seeing Selenite children trapped in the glass bottles meant to shape their growth to specific body-shapes, Cavor is repulsed; nor can he bring himself to walk past the garden where drugged workers lie in suspended animation). Is Cavor right when he has a reaction of horror, or right when he smothers that reaction? Is the hivelike society of the Selenite a utopia or a dystopia? The author does not make his own opinion known.
When Bedford first describes to the unworldly Cavor some of the practical and industrial applications of cavorite, I rolled my eyes, since I expected the typical scientifictional stereotype of the scientists as enlightened and the businessman as benighted to rear its stupid head. I assumed they would travel to the Moon, and Cavor would see and admire the beauties of the Lunar Soviet Socialist organization, whereas Bedford would be shown to be, like any businessman appearing in a Star Trek episode, Harcourt Fenton Mudd, part blind fool and part greedy scoundrel. Instead, the expected clash never came. Even when Bedford discovers his chains on the Moon are made of gold, there was no scene of him cackling over his wealth or dying because he burdened himself with more than he could carry. Instead, it is Cavor who comes across as somewhat blind, since he neither foresees the practical applications of Cavorite, nor realizes, until it is too late, that telling the Grand Lunar of the warlike ways of mankind would lead to his own death. It is Bedford, not Cavor, who frets that an imperial colony of Earthmen on the Moon would be tragic for the Selenites.
Bedford is the one who breaks his bonds and kills Selenites by the dozens during their escape attempt. While it is true that Cavor wanted to cooperate with their captors, nothing in the stories applauds Cavor’s initial reluctance to fight: he is dragged into the dark swarming silence of the planet-wide termite mound and never seen again.
A comparison with C.S. Lewis and OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET is inevitable, since Lewis was clearly writing an homage, or perhaps a rebuttal, to H.G. Wells. Weston is pretty clearly a riff on Cavor, the scientist, and Devine is the businessman, the Bedford. The space-sphere
of Weston is an inverted version of Cavor’s sphere, since it has supergravity rather than zero gravity (Ransom sees a man walking into his cabin from the adjoining cabin as if seeing a giant step over the horizon, because the curve of their miniature earth is so small). Even the episode of “Space Euphoria” speculated by Wells is the same, albeit Lewis gives it a religious twist by having the sun’s rays in “Deep Heaven” be life-giving, uplifting, golden and magnificent.
The main difference is that, both Bedford and Cavor are reluctant to allow man to exploit, enslave, or colonize the natives of the moon, both Devine and Weston, with moustache-twirling cartoon villainy, boast to the Ruling Intelligence of the planet Mars of human plans to enslave and even exterminate the natives first of this world, and then of all others. Devine and Weston are broadly drawn caricatures, or rather, straw men, whose function in the plot is to utter inanities so as to help the author make his rhetorical point.
Although C.S. Lewis is among my favorite authors, he comes across as inferior in his craft in this comparison with H.G. Wells. For example, when the Ruling Intelligence of Mars chides men for having ventured across outer space, he does so from the position of the author’s piety: the author clearly shares the disapproval of the ambition of fallen man. By contrast, when the Grand Lunar of the Moon chides Cavor in almost the same terms, it is for a different reason. The insect lord of the hollow moon cannot believe that man would bother to venture into outer space before first hollowing out his own planet, as the Selenites have done with theirs, and discovering all its treasures and secrets. Here Wells is portraying the logically expected yet unexpectedly alien point of view of a moon-creature. The author’s own opinion remains unspoken.
The Ruling Intelligence of Mars does the same thing that the Grand Lunar of the Moon does in like circumstances, or indeed, come to think of it, the Houyhnhnms of Houyhnhnmland, which is to sever relations with the outsiders. This may be because mankind is not fit to associate with the peaceful and civilized rational creatures of undiscovered islands and distant worlds, or it may be because authors need a fitting and final end to a story.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
