The First Men in the Moon by H. Wells (smart ebook reader TXT) 📗

much worse, if at all, than a polar expedition. Men go on polar expeditions’ (p. 26).) The Strand is also fascinated with modes of transport, featuring during the run of The First Men articles on a balloon competition, a train wreck, and a steamship fire. Its serial fictions tend to take place either in the English heartland — such as the bucolic rural settings of W. W. Jacobs’s comic village stories, reminiscent of the Kentish seaside setting of Wells’s opening chapters — or the British Empire, especially India — in these stories racial and national differences are heavily emphasized. Different kinds of masculine achievement are celebrated: ‘Lord Rosebery’s Turf Successes’, lion-taming, life-saving, the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, ‘The Modern Russian Officer’, ‘How the Victoria Cross is Made’. Arthur Conan Doyle is interviewed by an army officer on the subject of Doyle’s rifle club; the profile of Queen Victoria praises the future Edward VIII for his ambition of becoming a soldier. Imperial self-confidence is occasionally dented by moments of anxiety, particularly in the magazine’s recurring obsession with Germany and, still more so, the United States. A feature on the building of the battleship the Deutschland by Ray Stannard Baker is prefixed by the editorial reflection that ‘The fact that this country is no Supreme Mistress of the Seas in point of speed is not one on which a Briton can reflect with satisfaction.’16 Read with the benefit of hindsight, the attention in these numbers to European nation states’ efforts to exert influence beyond their own frontiers hints at the threat of a forthcoming war between the great powers.

When read serially among the other contents of the Strand Magazine, The First Men certainly feels more like a red-blooded imperial romance. Chapter IX, for instance, closes with the cliffhanger of Bedford’s desperate ‘ “Cavor!” I cried, laying a hand on his arm, “where is the sphere?” ’ (p. 56); later Bedford sees ‘scarlet, as the saying is’ (p. 107), and engages in physical combat with various Selenites. No attentive reader of this Wells text, however, could see its author as a blood-and-thunder colonialist, and the imperial echoes serve a purpose closer to parody than to flag-waving. The greedily acquisitive Bedford initially imagines himself as a conquistador in this new lunar world, eager to acquire and take home its untapped natural resources. He is too scientifically ill-educated to bring much back in the way of useful information about his experiences of either Cavorite or the moon, and in the ending that Wells eventually settles on, the greed which had sent Bedford to Lympne in the first place means that once he has banked his moon gold there is no stimulus for him to make any further effort to try to.

On the other hand, even before Cavor is captured by the Selenites, the inventor fears that the nature of human beings means that the ability to travel to the moon will be dangerous both for mankind and for the Selenites. While The First Men in the Moon was being written and published, Britain was waging war against the Boers in South Africa, two different sets of white occupiers struggling for dominance in a colonized space that was originally home to neither of them. Cavor worries that the same fate awaits a man-occupied moon.

‘It was I found the way here, but to find a way isn’t always to be master of a way. If I take my secret back to earth, what will happen? I do not see how I can keep my secret for a year, for even a part of a year. Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then. . . . Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while, if I tell my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but that is certain. . . . It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battle-ground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again — in a thousand years’ time.’ (p. 112–3)

In a preface to a later edition of The Time Machine Wells acknowledged the debt of his fictional method to Jonathan Swift.17 When in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) Gulliver travels to the world of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, he has to describe human activities such as war to a society that does not experience conflict. The clear-sighted Cavor similarly learns a great deal not only about society on the moon, but, in being made to see earth customs through lunar eyes when describing the earth to the Grand Lunar, about his own home as well. When trying to describe the very worst aspects of terrestrial social organization from a distance over 200,000 miles, Cavor is better able to perceive its true horror. Since the Selenites, as in Wells’s imagined World State, do not have nation states, they do not have wars; even the superbrain of the Grand Lunar, the moon world’s hyper-intelligent central organizing intelligence, ‘cannot conceive these things’ (p. 172). Cavor’s garrulous revelation to the Selenites of war’s existence on earth eventually seals his fate:

He had talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon world with this impression of our race, and then I think it is plain that he made the most fatal admission that upon himself alone hung the possibility — at least for