The First Men in the Moon

Two men build a sphere out of steel and a substance that gravity cannot get through, climb inside, and roll to the moon. That is the easy part. What follows is Wells at his most gleeful and his most exact: the lunar dawn coming across the crater in seven-league boots, the frozen air thawing into wind, and seeds cracking open and shooting upward fast enough to watch them do it. Bedford wants gold and Cavor wants to know things, and only one of them comes home. The other stays down there and keeps transmitting, and what he describes is the coldest vision in Wells. A young Selenite is sealed into a jar so that the one limb its job requires will grow while the rest of it starves, and the knowledge of the whole species is kept inside the swollen heads of specialists who never move. Then Cavor explains human history to the Grand Lunar.