H. G. Wells seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut in the worlds of Scientific Romance (the term Science Fiction was decades away). The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds. What great novels should come next? Now this is a matter of opinion, of course, but after 1900 Wells’s work changes, becomes less story and more lecture. The First Men in the Moon and The Food of the Gods, while great books, weren’t as good as those before. And even later, with The Sleeper Wakes and Men Like Gods and other later novels, adventure seems to be almost absent. The message has moved to the front. Wells had put away “childish things” and become serious business.
Which too is bad. I always felt he got the idea across better when he wasn’t trying so hard. Still, we can’t ignore the 20th Century books. And in that spirit let’s take a look at the critters he populated our satellite with in The First Men in the Moon (The Strand, December 1900 to August 1901 and in the US, The Cosmopolitan, November 1900-June 1901). Professor Cavor and Bedford go to the Moon in a capsule invented by the professor using his anti-grav metal, Cavorite. When they arrive the first living thing they encounter is the Moon Calf:
“…First of all was its enormous size: the girth of its body was some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose and fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic flabby body lay along the ground and that its skin was of corrugated white, dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile of at least the almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering, omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes. (For the mooncalf invariably shuts its eyes in the presence of the sun.) We had a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and bellow again, we had a breath from the pit, and then the monster heeled over like a ship, dragged forward along the ground, creasing all his leathery skin…” (The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells)
The Moon-Calf has a gigantic body since its breeders have farmed it to produce large amounts of food, much as our own cattle is bigger and fatter than a natural animal. The moon explorers come upon them without realizing what they are and are greatly frightened (imagine being frightened by a cow). In the 1963 film Ray Harryhausen makes them giant caterpillars which isn’t really correct.
The owners of the calf, are the Socialistic and insect-like Selenites. (Selene is the goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology.) Wells could have called them Lunarians or other names but chose Selenite, perhaps because it sounds like the mineral of the same name or more insectoid. Maybe he wanted to avoid the obvious “Looney”. Whatever the reason, the Selenites have their own appearance:
“By contrast with the mooncalves he seemed a trivial being, a mere ant, scarcely five feet high. He was wearing garments of some leathery substance so that no portion of his actual body appeared…He presented himself…as a compacted bristling creature, having much of the quality of a complicated insect, with whip-like tentacles, and a clanging arm projecting from his shining cylindrical body-case. The form of his head was hidden by his enormous, many-spiked helmet…and a pair of goggles of darkened glass set very much at the side gave a bud-like quality to the metallic apparatus that covered his face. His arms did not project beyond his body-case, and he carried himself upon short legs that wrapped though they were in warm coverings, seemed to our terrestrial eyes inordinately flimsy. They had very short thighs, very long shanks, and little feet.” (The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells)
The Selenites live in a vast city beneath the Moon. They raise moon-calf herds on the Moon’s surface. The Selenites were Wells’ chance to describe a Communistic society. As a Socialist, his political beliefs infused all of his monster creations. This time Ray Harryhausen did some great work creating the Selenites and their city for the 1963 film.
Other film and television versions include the silent film version (1919) and most recently the Mark Gatiss and Rory Kinnear television version in 2010.
In the end, I have to ask myself: how do the Moon creatures stack up against the earlier masterpieces of the Beast Folk and the Morlocks? I think the novel has its charms (it certainly is more humorous than many Wells books) but the threat of the Selenites is lacking. Where the Morlocks, the beast men or the Martains wanted you dead, the Selenites don’t carry that same wickedness. They wish to imprison the Earthmen but not destroy them. Cavor and Bedford have to win their freedom from the moon bugs but their human strength makes them more than a match. Bedford’s terror comes at the end of the adventure when he thinks he is stranded on the Moon alone, not from being eaten by a Selenite.
Wells will do better in The Food of the Gods, that book spawned all kinds of stupid monster movies, but The First Men in the Moon should not be overlooked in the influence department. C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938) would take much from Wells’s trip to the moon.
