The First Men in the Moon
From Spacefaring
The First Men in the Moon by the English author H. G. Wells is a scientific romance about a journey to the Moon by two Englishmen who discover that a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilisation of insect-like creatures ("Selenites") inhabits the lunar interior. The first-person narrator Mr. Bedford, a businessman, recounts his adventure with an eccentric scientist, who has invented a gravity-blocking substance (cavorite) that the pair then use to construct a spherical spacecraft to reach the Moon, hoping to find valuable minerals. The work was originally serialised in The Strand Magazine (UK) and The Cosmopolitan (USA) from November 1900 to June 1901 and was published in hardcover book form in 1901. Wells called it one of his "fantastic stories".

