Conceptual Fiction: The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells

Conceptual Fiction is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on major works of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism and alternate history. These books are celebrated in recognition that literary experimentation with ways of conceptualizing reality has been as important as experimentation with language in creating fiction of lasting value. Dismissing these books as genre or escapist works has created a blind-spot in literary studies that this feature aims, in some small part, to rectify.

For as long as stories have been told, their narrators have delighted in the possibility of traveling above the surface of the Earth. When we recall the tale of Icarus, who suffered by soaring too close to the sun, or hear the words of the psalmist—“Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away”—we recapture in some degree the essence of this primitive longing. (Track down a copy of the out-of-print study Voyages to the Moon (1948) by Marjorie Hope Nicolson for an expansive history of this literature.)

By the time we get to the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, these dreams are married to a modern pride in technology and an unabashed confidence in scientific advances. As such, these authors created stories of a different flavor, freed from the magical and mythical, and married to a quasi-realistic narrative style. Novels such as Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901) reveal, in a myriad of small ways, that they were written by men who not only dreamed about a lunar voyage, but who had some expectations about its inevitability.

Nonetheless, Wells—in stark contrast to Verne, who laboriously outlined the technological details of how his travelers were propelled to the Moon—simply concocts a phantasmagoric substance called cavorite—an anti-gravity metal that lets his explorers shoot off into the stratosphere without any need of fuel or engine or moving parts. One is inevitably reminded of “flubber” (a name created by compressing the longer term “flying rubber”), first introduced to moviegoers in the 1961 Walt Disney film The Absent-Minded Professor. In case you missed that film—ah, to be so lucky!—Fred MacMurray relied on flubber to fly around in a levitated Model T Ford.

Wells has his own absent-minded professor, Dr. Cavor, who is the inventor of this propulsion system that will send his (rocket-less) ship to the moon.  But the good doctor would hardly be able to put his ideas into play without the assistance of his more practical and business-minded neighbor Mr. Bedord. Think of them as the Victorian equivalents of Wozniak and Jobs. Wells’s concept of science seems to revolve around workshop eccentrics of this sort—readers may recall that his “time machine” was also the invention of a single individual tinkering away at home. Here again Verne is more realistic in his comprehension that only a large-scale effort by a huge team, well financed and with a broad range of skills, could ever make a lunar expedition into a reality.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. You can follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedgioia.

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