In the ensuing fight, Bedford kills three Selenites. When they reach a dark abyss, the Selenites want to force their prisoners to step onto a bridge that leads into the dark. Blue glowing streams flow on the floor to provide light. After the Selenites have brought their captives food, they lead them through caves with strange machines. When Bedford wakes up, he is in a small room with Cavor. While intoxicated, they encounter a group of six Selenites, who take them prisoner and carry them into the interior of the moon. Hungry, Cavor and Bedford eat mushrooms that induce intoxication. The moon people are referred to as Selenites by Cavor and Bedford (after the Greek moon goddess Selene ). In search of the bullet, they come across a herd of moon cows guarded by ant-like moon people. As they leave the sphere and explore the landscape, they get lost. After sunrise, the snow melts and bushes and large mushrooms spring up from the ground. From inside the globe, travelers watch the sun rise. There is snow on the surface of the moon. When they reach the moon, it is night there.
Cavor and Bedford, the first-person narrator of the novel, build a large hollow sphere in Cavor's house in which they fly to the moon. In his house, Cavor developed a new material that was not affected by gravity he gives it the name cavorite. To attract attention and create such sympathy was Wells's steadfast aim.During a stay in the country, the unsuccessful businessman and playwright Bedford meets the headstrong scientist Cavor. Gregory's review of The War of the Worlds ( Nature 57, 339–340 1898) had ventured that “scientific romances are not without a value in furthering scientific interests they attract attention to work that is being done in the realm of natural knowledge, and so create sympathy with the aims and observations of men of science”. Gregory advised Wells on lunar gravity for The First Men in the Moon and when Wells died in 1946, Gregory wrote the Nature obituary of the genius with whom he had first collaborated 50 years before ( Nature 158, 399–402 1946). Before he became editor of Nature, Gregory had co-authored Honours Physiography with Wells he was an assistant editor at the journal when Wells, a then-unknown teacher and jobbing science writer, published 'Popularising Science'. Two friendships were constant: one with fellow novelist Arnold Bennett, the other with Gregory. Wells knew, and argued with, most of the significant writers and political leaders of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Then, informed by the knowledge of humanity's shared evolutionary origins, the history of the future would see nation states dissolving in favour of a system of cooperative world government. His hope was that, if the intellectual enquirer were armed with the right kinds of knowledge, history might be predicted like the movements of planets and tides. The result was global woe: “to defective education was due the general neglect of science and 'muddling through',” as he told the 11th annual meeting of the British Science Guild ( Nature 99, 186–187 1917). (This positivistic idea of science was fairly short-lived, lasting only from Charles Darwin's dethroning of humanity as the summit of creation to the early-twentieth-century advent of quantum mechanics, which undermined claims of absolute scientific certainty.) But Britain's educational system failed to enshrine science properly, Wells felt the privileged status of classics was a consistent target of his ire.
Wells recording for the BBC (top) and during his biology studies at university.Ĭredit: Top: BBC Photo Library Bottom: Archivio GBB/Contrasto/Eyevineįor Wells, the scientific method conferred on its user the authority to rethink and challenge these stale ideas, and should underpin every area of human endeavour.
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