The narrator, Mr Bedford, is in Lympne on the south Kent coast where he meets Cavor, an inventor, who makes Cavorite, a material which is opaque to gravity. Together they fashion a sphere which can harness Cavorite to travel to the moon. Bedford, a failed businessman, wants to prospect for minerals and perhaps develop financially viable colonies. Cavor aims at purely scientific exploration. They get to the moon and have adventures among the moon's inhabitants.
The book is carefully structured in four parts. They land on the moon on page 42 , almost exactly at the 25% mark; the turning point in their adventures is at 50% and splashdown is almost precisely at 75%. Presumably, the fact that this book was written to be serialised in the Strand magazine (starting in 1900 and ending in 1901, thus spanning the turn of the century and the change from Victorian to Edwardian Britain) assisted this structuring.
Science fiction books of necessity involve a certain amount of 'world-building', a careful (and hopefully consistent) description of an imaginary world. This short novel has huge amounts of world-building and, while this may be enjoyed by many scifi fans, I found this tedious. Despite the beautifully antagonistic pair of characters (and this is essentially a two-hander, containing only two important characters) I felt the character development which drives most modern novels was seriously lacking. This limited my enjoyment.
In many ways this was a repeat of The Time Machine, which was the novel that gave Wells his early success. An explorer in an alien land meets creatures with a strange social system and has adventures underground. But while TTM was a carefully constructed social commentary, TFMITM relies more on the element of straightforward adventure. In my opinion, this makes the narrative less interesting.
Selected quotes:
- "He had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat and cycling knickerbockers and stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he never played cricket." (C 1)
- "It was clear their were drawbacks to Mr Cavor's society I had not foreseen. The absent-mindedness that had just escaped depopulating the terrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grace inconvenience." (C 2)
- "It's this accursed Science ... It's the very Devil. The mediaeval 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." (C 13)
- "I had the moral advantage of a mad bull in the street." (C 17)
- "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." (C 19)
- "To drug the worker one does not want and toss him aside is surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving in the streets." (C 24)
Other novels by H G Wells reviewed in this blog include:
Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:
- H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
- H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot
October 2021; 176 pages
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