In ending his main plot with that split, Wells inadvertently created something that many science fiction novels and many online works have emulated: the worldbuilding-heavy epilogue containing things that could not have been elegantly fit in the main narrative. Through a complicated series of events, Bedford makes it home but Cavor does not. Eventually, they end up misplacing the location of their craft, and find themselves in an underground cave system which hosts the civilization of the indigenous population of the moon: the Selenites. On the moon, Bedford and Cavor find a world that is covered in snow and in bushes, with livestock and other animals that run about this tundra. Eventually, the two men find themselves in a ball-shaped contraption that works via Cavorite, a synthetic substance that can resist the force of gravity. He is quite wealthy, more than a little eccentric, and is willing to put subordinates in danger in the name of progress. Cavor is a prototype of the Heinleinesque scientific hero, albeit one whose ending is drearier than those created by Heinlein. He is introduced humming incessantly whilst strolling along a country road, and is unaware of the strange things he does when asked about them by Bedford. Bedford is very much an audience surrogate as many modern science fiction works have, who exists to marvel at the strangeness of everything and to have various concepts explained to him (and by extension the reader).īedford is in some ways a blank slate (but the writers among us will know very well his frustration with his inability to write a play that he is satisfied with), and it is Cavor who is the more interesting character. The core of this novel is an interaction between two characters: Bedford, the narrator, a businessman and attempted playwright, and Cavor, the scientist who develops the spaceship. Indeed, Verne criticized Wells for not trying to use actual science to get his characters out of Earth’s atmosphere. His approach is not the ruthlessly practical manner that Jules Verne does in From the Earth to the Moon Wells was never the sort of writer who was immensely concerned with scientific accuracy (he makes the good decision in this book to avoid too detailed descriptions of how the vessel actually gets to the Moon), being something of the progenitor of ‘soft science fiction’ as opposed to Verne’s hardness that rivals bedrock. This would be The First Men in the Moon, an account of a voyage to and through that pearl that hangs in Earth’s night sky. This is a man who predicted massive strategic bombing campaigns in The War in the Air and the atomic bomb in The World Set Free, and then lived until 1946, having seen both of those nightmares come to life in all their horror.īut it is not his nightmares we shall discuss here it is one of his more optimistic dreams. I can confidently say that the man was a genius, even if many of his predictions did not come true the ones that did are so prescient I think they make up for it. His oeuvre can feel like you’re in an old warehouse of prototypes for the science fiction and fantasy stories that you grew up with. Wells for unleashing tripods bearing heat rays and black smoke on London, or giving Doctor Moreau his island full of experiments, or sending a man into the murky depths of the future, or giving a madman the power to become invisible.
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