• It is the 150th anniversary of H. G. Wells's birth in 2016
• Detailed Introduction is informed by the latest Wells scholarship
• Includes a chronology, bibliography, and notes to provide additional contextual interest
• Discusses the contexts and influence of the novel that develop Well's social and political concerns, in which he fortells the consequences of unchecked imperialism and greed

     
'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.