But if Wells is vague on his applied science, he makes up for it in his storytelling skills. His narrator, the scheming Bedford, sets an amusing tone from the outset. He is evading creditors and trying to put together his life after a failed business venture. His interest in his neighbor’s scientific theories is pecuniary, pure and simple, and he dreams of corporate profits and royalty streams. He constantly interrupts his account of the Moon trip to offer threadbare excuses and exculpatory explanations for his venal behavior. He is little better than a scoundrel, but a lovable one all the same, if only for his persistence in self-justification. His colleague Cavor is as idealistic as Bedford is mercenary, and Wells makes use of this contrast in temperaments to impart some bite and irony to their dialogues and dealings.
After a failed experiment that blows the top off Cavor’s cottage and causes damage to nearby homesteads, the duo are ready for their trip. Wells’s concept of the Moon is similar to his prognostications about the future in The Time Machine. His travelers encounter a lunar society, living underground, that is so stratified and hierarchical, that the Age of Feudalism looks like a hippie commune by contrast. This provides our author with a platform for social commentary, but he doesn’t get as much mileage here—certainly not as much as he is able to extract from the fanciful scenarios of some of his other novels. Some readers, however, may be grateful for the relatively small amount of armchair philosophizing, which leaves plenty of room for fights, escapes, close calls and other swashbuckling interludes.
Wells in this work—as in so many of his best known tales—sets up a conflict between his protagonists and the amorphous surrounding social forces. The villains in these stories are rarely distinguished for their individuality and personal qualities, instead we have the community of Morlocks in The Time Machine, the mysterious aliens of The War of the Worlds, the packs of mutant creatures in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Usually these collectives betray some affinity with the less desirable traits of the Victorian society in which Wells came of age. Either they stand out for the oppressiveness of their class structures or their imperialistic tendencies or for some other aspect that would have been all too familiar to Wells’s readers. It is to this author’s credit that he could craft such well-paced adventures on the basis of so little individualized villainy.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy
I happen to have a 1934 collection of Wells' stories - with an introduction by the author himself.
In the introduction he explains very clearly that what wrote was not science at all, but a human story toyed with in one particular way to change things just a tad. He called it science fantasy that was designed to get you as involved in it as you would in good gripping dream. He credits Vernes as writing real science fiction, because the emphasis is on science in all of his novels. He is generous enough not to criticize Vernes on his character development in his own novels. Wells said that this collection did not include the "Autocracy of Mr. Parham", (or sumthin' like that) which he described as a comedy that never struggled through to a soft-cover edition. Writing in 1934, he asked "why should people read my invented fantasies when they can see the real actions of Mr. Hitler instead?"
Sometimes having a real old book with comments by the author is damned helpful.
2 - roger nowosielski
Ted,
Looked at your "100 Books" list; since you mentioned Invisible Man near the top, I invite you to look at Mr. Horace Mungin's short piece "Phantom Culprit," in the Politics section, May 12, 2009.
I'm certain you'll enjoy it.
Roger