The First Men in the Moon

The First Men in the Moon

By H. G. Wells

Narrated by Graham Scott and Andy Harrington.

Travel to Moon was probably the first subject addressed in science fiction literature. The earliest surviving account of a lunar voyage is that described by the Second Century Greek writer Lucian of Samosata in his True History. In the Seventeenth Century, the astronomer Johannes Kepler, Anglican divine Francis Godwin, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon all composed imaginary accounts of lunar travel, and in 1835, Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall." In 1865, Jules Verne's presented his account of a trip to the Moon in "From the Earth to the Moon."

Here, it was almost inevitable that this subject would attract the interest of H.G Wells in the batch of sci-fi novels that he wrote between 1895 and 1901. In Well's story, the vehicle is not a balloon, as in many of the previous accounts, but a sphere made of a mysterious substance, named "cavorite" after its inventor, Cavor, who accompanies the narrator, Bedford, on the trek to the moon. The ascent is made possible by the fact the "cavorite" is, in Well's words, "transparent to gravity."

Like previous lunar visitors, Bedford and Cavor discover that the Moon is not uninhabited and that they have to develop ways of dealing with an alien civilization.