Books with title The First Moon Walk

SUICIDE RACE TO LUNA The four men had been scrutinized, watched, investigated, and intensively trained for more than a year. They were the best men to be found for that first, all-important flight to the Moon—the pioneer manned rocket that would give either the East or the West control over the Earth. Yet when the race started, Adam Crag found that he had a saboteur among his crew ... a traitor! Such a man could give the Reds possession of Luna, and thereby dominate the world it circled. Any one of the other three could be the hidden enemy, and if he didn't discover the agent soon—even while they were roaring on rocket jets through outer space—then Adam Crag, his expedition, and his country would be destroyed!

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This book is an illustrated version of the original The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells. “As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. It might have been any one. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I had gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in the world. "Here, at any rate," said I, "I shall find peace and a chance to work!"And this book is the sequel. So utterly at variance is destiny with all the little plans of men. I may perhaps mention here that very recently I had come an ugly cropper in certain business enterprises. Sitting now surrounded by all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in admitting my extremity. I can admit, even, that to a certain extent my disasters were conceivably of my own making. It may be there are directions in which I have some capacity, but the conduct of business operations is not among these. But in those days I was young, and my youth among other objectionable forms took that of a pride in my capacity for affairs. I am young still in years, but the things that have happened to me have rubbed something of the youth from my mind. Whether they have brought any wisdom to light below it is a more doubtful matter.”

The First Men in the Moon by Herbert George Wells is the unheralded novel by one of the founders of a science fiction genre. After the actual bankruptcy, the n character of the novel tries to hide in a province and start a new life as a novelist or playwright. But his neighbour turns out to be an oddish scientist who invents antigravity material. The main hero became friends with the oddish scientist and tempts him with a prospect of “commercialization of the invention”. Inspired by this idea, at the accelerated pace, they build a space vehicle in a shape of a sphere covered with antigravity material. While opening and closing the windows, our heroes fly away from Earth that doesn’t pull them anymore to the Moon, which quickly attracts them. At first, the Moon seemed completely lifeless and deserted but it began to in all senses at daybreak. The frozen at night air melts and in the beginning moon animals appear from underground caves and then selenites, intelligent Moon inhabitants emerge. Our travellers from Erath lose their spaceship in grown Moon jungles and then are captured by selenites. Eventually, they manage to escape from the underground. The main hero, nearly frozen to death in the Moon evening, reaches their spaceship after all, but the scientist is taken again as a prisoner by selenites…

“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.” So says Ursula K. Le Guin in her Introduction to The First Men in the Moon, H. G. Wells’s 1901 tale of space travel. Heavily criticized upon publication for its fantastic ideas, it is now justly considered a science fiction classic. Cavor, a brilliant scientist who accidentally produces a gravity-defying substance, builds a spaceship and, along with the materialistic Bedford, travels to the moon. The coldly intellectual Cavor seeks knowledge, while Bedford seeks fortune. Instead of insight and gold they encounter the Selenites, a horrifying race of biologically engineered creatures who viciously, and successfully, defend their home.

'My next clear recollection is that we were prisoners at we knew not what depth beneath the moon's surface ...At the village of Lympne, on the south coast of England, the 'most uneventful place in the world' the failed playwright Mr Bedford meets the brilliant inventor Mr Cavor, and together they invade the moon.Dreaming respectively of scientific renown and of mineral wealth, they fashion a sphere from the gravity-defying substance Cavorite and go where no human has gone before. They expect a dead world, but instead they find lunar plants that grow in a single day, giant moon-calves and the ant-like Selenites, the super-adapted inhabitants of the Moon's utopian society.The First Men in the Moon is both an inspired and imaginative fantasy of space travel and alien life, and a satire of turn-of-the-century Britain and of utopian dreams of a wholly ordered and rational society.

The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon by the impecunious businessman Mr Bedford and the brilliant but eccentric scientist Dr Cavor. On arrival, Bedford and Cavor find the moon inhabited by a race of moon-folk the two call "Selenites." The novel can also be read as a critique of prevailing political opinions from the turn of the century, particularly of imperialism.Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist.