342 pages
Published 1901
Read from March 10 to March 12
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
Growing up as I did living in a car with a father possessed of religious psychosis, I was rarely permitted to read anything more current than the Edwardian era. I came to cherish the works of H. G. Wells. The First Men in the Moon was a particular favorite back then. Wells’ droll social humor gives it a different flavor from his earlier scientific romances, but it’s still a novel of adventure on (and within) an alien world, one of the earliest alien worlds (that I know of) built upon the aesthetics of science rather than mysticism.
Perhaps I’d feel that way now if I read it for the first time. As it is, revisiting it felt disappointing, in a way that neither The War of the Worlds nor The Invisible Man had been. (Disregard the higher rating I gave The Invisible Man back in the day; I don’t like it better than War of the Worlds, I simply became much more critical over the years.) There’s a tonal mismatch between the social humor, which is both manic and mean-spirited, and the lunar adventure, which prefigures A. Merritt’s idiom of vast subterranean dungeons. As a preteen, I didn’t mind the mixture, but it feels to me nowadays like Wells wanted to write an observational comedy but felt constrained to churn out a scientific romance.
The overall effect is… fine? I expected more of a nostalgia kick from Moon, more in line with what I found in Worlds and The Time Machine, but it just didn’t click with me that way this time.
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