Pages - Just tipping over 200 in paperback.
Synopsis - When Penniless businessmen Mr. Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr. Cavor, and absent minded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. He succeeds only to tell Bedford that this will make possible trips to the moon. Bedford motivated by money and Cavor by desire for knowledge. But neither are prepared for what they find.
Your thoughts on the book - Well first of all I would say do not judge the book on it's C19th science. Sure man landed on the moon now some 38 years ago [or did they?], but this book isn't merely telling the tale of the moon. Quite succinctly it explores the ideas of exploration and what drives humanity to strive out of the comfortable and known.
It is written in the style of a report from the perspective of Mr. Bedford. It starts off rather slowly, we are introduced to Mr. Bedford and he in turn is introduced to Cavor; they almost doom humanity to suffocation but merely blow up their working area and blow in windows about the house. Mr. Wells does a good job in skipping over this part rather hastily and getting to the juicy bits though.
They build a sphere out of Cavorite (A metal involving helium in some way. Wells never goes into too much science, which I find a good thing, on the excuse of Bedford's lack of knowledge who is of course 'writing' this.) and glass which they plan to 'fly' to the moon. As you can imagine though planning for a 2 man trip to the moon in an untested substance could offer some problems, saying that Cavor seems to always have a way of thinking ahead...
Until the land on the moon. Filled with the joyous feeling of their muscles being able to hurl them many feet with one effortless bound on the moon Cavor and Bedford set themselves to go into the dark and explore. But the one mistake they make is to forget where their sphere had been left and (after eating some dodgy moon mushrooms) they fall into the hands of the Selenites ('mooneys' intelligent 'ant' like beings who live inside the moon). You will laugh when you read this passage even though later you will see the tragedy of it.
This is where Wells' imagination kicks in and transforms the readers view of the moon which they peer up at almost every night. The two explorers are confronted with this species of intelligent life completely void of humanity. It is mentioned how the character always expects one to take off a mask and throw it off revealing a human face underneath, I believe that is a beautiful thought in its understanding of human behaviour. What I mean is the way he mixes in ideas of man's understanding of reality when it is faced with the seemingly unreal, epistemology etc...
The two characters are now imprisoned and from now on it is all about characters as far as I am concerned. Here is one character 'Cavor' whose primary objective is quite clearly knowledge and nothing much else and who hopes to trust the Selenites; and 'Bedford' a rash decision maker, a man with his feet on the ground, and a man who bemoans Cavor's lack of decision to take weapons with them to the moon.
They go along pretty much all the way with Cavor (Because Bedford really seems to not fully understand what is going on) until they are faced with the problem of crossing a six inch wide plank (most probably made out of gold. No wood on the Moon) across and seemingly into the dark abyss. At this point, interestingly, Bedford becomes to take control by...erm...smashing open the skull of a Selenite guard who is prodding him in the rear with a sharp moon implement to get him going.
From this point then a hell breaks loose. The whole of the moon are after these two crazed humans, and Wells' compares them to wild animals (tigers) who are out of control in the eyes of the Selenites. Eventually they do escape the moon tunnels (Not without a lot of happenings and Selenite death) in one piece, with a nasty reputation, and a host of gold objects. Here however they still need to find the sphere to get home and this is the reason for their split.
Cavor is captured by Selenites and Bedford finds the sphere. Realising that Cavor has been taken out of his reached (the main gate to the undermoon was locked) he takes the sphere, which he knows not how to work, and travels off back to the Earth with a little common sense. It worked by opening bits of Cavorite and exposing glass so that the gravity of a certain place in space could act upon it and therefore being able to make direction. When the whole thing is covered in Cavorite then it virtually turns into its own universe with the things inside attracting each other and floating.
Right so Bedford gets back to the Earth, rather worse for wear, and he lands (with extreme accuracy) almost directly from where they had set off on the English side of the English Channel just East of Brighton. It doesn't go too well though from then on. First nobody believes his story, and then the sphere is stolen by an adventurous youngster who apparently flies off to their death. Briefly after this the book descends, literally, into Cavor's tale of the inside of the Moon.
Cavor manages to get a message back to Earth that reaches, eventually, the ears of Bedford (who has now changed his name to Wells...). It is here Cavor tells of his demise in communicating his specie's lust for violence back on Earth. The Selenite world is one where these aliens are bred for a specific purpose (See similar things in A Brave New World I guess) and there is a great line where Wells writes something akin to - it is not as bad as you think at least these creatures are not given humanity and then expected to be something completely different. Tapping into perhaps a hypocrisy of civilisation which bleeds into the greater plot as a whole looking at why people go out and explore with no definite objective in mind. Cavor is put up in front of the Great Lunar and it is here he makes his mistake of talking about Humanity's war and greed. It is assumed that the moon people have him killed inside the dark ignorance, whilst Bedford lives in the light but never being able to justify the dark to others.
At the end though you wonder whether the whole thing was not just a dream of Bedford's (aka Wells) after all. There is doubt implied within the style of the book.
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OK sorry if I did something wrong there because this is my first post, but boy did I enjoy it anyway.
