The First Men in the Moon

Bedford, a bankrupt businessman hiding in the English countryside to write a play, meets Mr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist who has invented a substance that blocks gravity. Together they build a glass sphere and fly to the Moon, where they find a frozen world that comes alive with the lunar dawn and a vast civilisation of insect-like Selenites living in caverns beneath the surface.

Published in 1901, the novel is both a thrilling adventure and a satire of human greed, since Bedford sees the Moon mainly as a source of gold. Its picture of a society in which each creature is shaped for a single job is still unsettling. It belongs with The Time Machine among Wells's best scientific romances.

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.

He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.