The First Alien Dystopia
WELLS, H. G. The First Men in the Moon. London: George Newnes, 1901.
8vo. Blue cloth bound with lettering and gilt stamped devices to upper board and spine; black coated end papers; housed in a custom-made navy blue, felt-lined, fall-down-back box, with leather label to spine embossed in gilt; pp. viii, 342, with twelve full-page black and white plates, including frontispiece, by Claude Shepperson; corners and spine quite bumped, with some very light foxing to the title page, and spine very slightly sunned; very good.
First edition, first issue. One of the most difficult of Wells' Science Fiction titles to be found in its first state.
Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine, this edition is the first appearance in book form, and it was this novel specifically which went on to influence C. S. Lewis’ own science fiction titles. Argued to be the first alien dystopia, it was to become Wells’ last scientific romances, and was the first of his books to be turned into a film in 1919. The film was directed by Bruce Gordon and J. L. V. Leigh, and was a black-and-white silent movie. Today, it is listed on the British Film Institute's "75 Most Wanted" list of lost films.
“What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk 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…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.” (p.222)
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