The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells

The First Men in the Moon

First off, I have to say that one trick of Wells' I truly admire was that of having a narrator who is not the main scientist of the story. That allowed him to present an idea like cavorite, an antigravity metal, without having to dive too deeply into a practical explanation. The narrator just says something like, "Oh, and I don't know how it worked, but then, I'm just a businessman," and then get on with the more important stuff like fighting moon-based insect beings or traveling millions of years into the future.

(I hear this bugged the crap out of Jules Verne, who was quoted as saying, "I get my voyagers to the Moon with gun cotton - something you can buy in any store - and Mr Wells uses a totally mythical substance. Pah! Where is this Cavorite? Let him produce it!" Which is probably why I prefer Wells to Verne.)

You know, I'm glad we've been to the Moon and all, but we have lost a certain opportunity to simply guess and invent what might be happening up there on our nearest neighbor.

Anyway, things don't get good and dystopian until the last few chapters, when Wells managed to hide a creepy little statement on colonization and specialization in his adventure yarn. The image of the young Selenites cramped into bottles with just their arms protruding in order to be modified to perform their assigned life task squicked me out the same way stories about comprachicos do (no shock - it's basically the same idea, and I have to guess that Wells was at least partially inspired by Victor Hugo's take on it in "The Man Who Laughs", which was published in the 1860s).

final thoughts: Did Cavor deliberately tell the Grand Lunar about humans' taste for violence and war? And if he did, was it to save us from them or them from us?

And if we can't get there, we'll make it up.

"What is this spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk even a reasonable certainty of death? 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. Almost any man, if you put the thing to him, not in words, but in the shape of opportunities, will show that he knob as much. Against his interest, against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him, and go he must. But why? Why?"
- First Men in the Moon, HG Wells

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

The Time Machine

I'd read this one many years ago, but it's short and easy to page through, so I gave it another turn. I'm glad I did. I remembered most of the main plot points - the Morlocks, the Eloi, their relationship, the machine itself - but not most of the language or Wells' final image of the dying Earth.

What I, as a modern reader, find missing from TTM is space travel. The whole theory on why the Eloi and Morlocks have become what they are is that man tamed the Earth, and then lack of challenge led to devolution. Not surprising, given that manned hot air balloons were pretty much the flight of the day. A more recent novel would have to work around the idea that man could turn to the stars for adventure and meaning when he's made the Earth into a garden.

final thought: Let's see. The science is still vague enough to be reasonable, in its way. The Morlocks are still creepy fuckers, the Eloi still pitiful, and the end of the world is still a depressingly bleak vision. I'm glad I reread it.