The First Men in the Moon

The First Men in the Moon was serialised in The Strand Magazine in Britain and The Cosmopolitan in the United States between November 1900 and June 1901, and it appeared in hardcover in 1901. Wells counted it among what he called his fantastic stories.

The tale is told by Mr Bedford, a businessman, and it concerns his trip with Mr Cavor, an eccentric scientist who has invented a substance that blocks gravity. The two of them use it to build a spherical craft and set off for the Moon, partly in the hope of finding minerals worth bringing home.

What they find there is not a dead rock. Under the surface lives a sophisticated society of insect-like beings, the Selenites, and the novel describes the world they have built and the way the two visitors are received in it. Wells was working in a long tradition of writing about the Moon, and his main scientific starting point was Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel, which had used the same word for the Moon's imagined inhabitants.