First Men In Moon - Softcover

Wells, H.G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425036030 ISBN 13: 9780425036037

Publisher: Berkley, 1979

Synopsis

Two men left for the moon -- but only one will come back. . . . Cavor, a brilliant scientist, accidentally produces a gravity-defying substance. And what to do with a substance like that? Well, if it's the turn of the twentieth century, when Wells was writing, the only thing to do was build a spaceship and travel to the moon. Cavor just wants to understand the moon, but along on the trip with him is Bedford, a cold and calculating business man who's in it for nothing but money. Instead of insight and gold they encounter the Selenites, a horrifying race of biologically engineered creatures vaguely reminiscent of jumped-up ants, who viciously -- and successfully -- defend their home. . . . Why do people read science fiction? In hopes of receiving such writing as this -- a ravishingly accurate vision of things unseen; an utterly unexpected yet necessary beauty. -- Ursula K. Le Guin

About this title

About the Author

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometime shopkeeper, his mother a former lady’s maid. Although "Bertie" left school at fourteen to become a draper’s apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novel rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher’s salary. His other "scientific romances"—The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908)—won him distinction as the father of science fiction.

Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase "the war that will end war" to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: "Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me."

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0425036030
• ISBN 13: 9780425036037
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback