Book Description

This is the annotated edition including the rare biographical essay by Edwin E. Slosson called "H. G. Wells - A Major Prophet Of His Time". The book is also fully illustrated with a wealth of beautiful drawings. There is probably no other living writer than the author of "The War of the Worlds" whose brain possesses that abnormal twist requisite to the production of such a story as "The First Men In the Moon." The conception of a planet peopled by a race of articulated creatures, gigantic insects, endowed with something akin to human intelligence, whose entire life is passed not upon the moon's surface, but miles below it. In chambers and passages hollowed out after the fashion of a colossal ant hill—all this described with that touch of verisimilitude which is the one thing which makes H. G. Wells readable, gives an uncanny, at times almost ghastly, effect that makes this moon story the most weird and striking of anything that he has written since the days of "The Time Machine." He takes us on endless rambles through these vast lunar caverns, lit only by the pallid rays that come from streams of liquid blue fire, and shows us a world in which the forests are colossal growths of pink and blue and green mushrooms and the commonest utensils of everyday life are made of solid gold. It is a curious, whimsical book. and. as usual, Mr. Wells has been doubly fortunate in having a sympathetic illustrator. Mr. Shepperson's pictorial interpretations of the text are thoroughly in keeping with the whole spirit of the thing and make the various phases of this imaginary moon life sufficiently vivid to haunt one with the persistence of a nightmare.