What I should be doing is continuing on with Ibsen, writing about his ungainly ten act masterpiece Emperor and Galilean. But at some point I took a break from Ibsen to read The First Men in the Moon (1901) by H. G. Wells, so now I will take a break to write about it. Easier to read, easier, to summarize, easier to bat around.
Summary: An absent-minded scientist, Cavor, invents an anti-gravity metal, Cavorite. For some reason the first thing he does with it is fly to the moon. For some other reason he takes a venal bankrupt with a fancy prose style with him. The men are captured by the moon-men, the Selenites, and taken to their phosphorescent moon-caves. Thus the puzzling preposition in the novel’s title. Wells wrote “in” and meant it. The bankrupt escapes and writes a shocking and, frankly, almost unbelievable memoir about his experiences.
The literary tradition of trips to the moon goes back at least to Lucian’s True History (2nd century), where the method of transport is a whirlwind. A knight in Orlando Furioso (1532) gets to the moon by hippogriff. Jules Verne shot his astronauts to the moon with a giant cannon, much like Georges Méliès did in A Trip to the Moon (1902).
“That's perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed. That, of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have to be a valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without much loss of air.”
“Like Jules Verne's thing in A Trip to the Moon.”
But Cavor was not a reader of fiction. (Ch. 3)
The 1993 Everyman paperback I read has a lot of baffling stuff about the reaction to this particular Wells novel, a lot of nonsense about science and Wells as a “prophet,” even though a trip to the moon is less of an original prophecy than anything Wells had written before. The passage above is a winking acknowledgment.
Yet Jules Verne insists the science is on his side, as he says in a 1903 interview:
I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannonball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars [?] in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. That’s all very well but show me this metal. Let him produce it. (p. 189)
Yes, H., why do you not produce the magical metal? Verne, after all, produced the giant cannon. He must have. Otherwise his challenge makes no sense. Charitably, I take all of this an amusing hoax on gullible readers. Less charitably, I fear Verne believed himself – “Here there is no invention.”
The Wells novel is almost nothing but invention, some of it absolutely marvelous, some of it satirical and even political, some of it just for laughs. The First Men in the Moon is a fifth book of Gulliver’s Travels, or Alice in Lunarland, or the teleplay for Laurel and Hardy in Space. I am not sure who should play the scientist, Laurel or Hardy. The movie would work either way.
There is even some science, although not where it seems it should be. Ignore Verne’s misdirection. Remember The Time Machine (1895) and so on.
I might be able to avoid Ibsen for several days with this piece of fluff.
The quotation in the title is from Chapter 13.
Those Verne comments are amazing. "Otherwise his challenge makes no sense" is also good. Quite a segue from Ibsen to Wells, eh?
ReplyDeleteThere are better things in the actual Wells novel than that Verne quote. but not many.
ReplyDeleteIbsen was crushing me. Wells is much lighter.
Having read Verne recently for the first time in a few decades, I'm disinclined to trust his science, though he clearly made an effort to come up with explanations that sounded like good science.
ReplyDeleteAnother lunar journey example well worth reading: Cyrano de Bergerac's Les Etats et Empires de la Lune, which I recall reading with genuine joy. I may just have to re-read it.
This is one of my favorites from childhood. So many ideas presented by Wells here. The entire "aliens hate war" thing was clever yet funny. This and other ideas have reoccured over and over agin in both good and bad science fiction.
ReplyDeletethat sounded like good science - exactly, exactly.
ReplyDeleteThere is a point near the end of the Wells novel where it turns into a pamphlet of the Permanent International Peace Bureau, but Wells does at least pull that stuff back into the story, as Brian says. Although the aliens do not hate war. It is even more clever than that. Maybe I will write about that today.
Sounds like there was quite a rivalry between Verne and Wells. Maybe Verne resented Wells being called a prophet. But for all Verne's "I use science" Wells ends up being closer to the mark since as far as I know no one has been launched into space in a cannonball.
ReplyDeleteIn the Cyrano de Bergerac trip to the moon, a comical method, with no pretensions to serious science, is first used. Vials filled with lighter-than-air gas are attached to the traveler's belt. Determining the right number of vials proves to be the tricky part.
DeleteLighter-than-air gas vials? Ah ha ha, so Wells makes a reference to that. The anti-gravity metal is in part made of helium (which had been discovered only a few years ago - science!).
ReplyDeleteI am pretty sure that mad scientists have been launched into space with a cannon, although in more of a bullet than a cannonball. They landed in the moon's eye. The scientists proceeded to hit moon-men with their umbrellas. I have seen this myself, so it must be true. Click on that Georges Méliès link for documentary visual proof.
The Georges Méliès film (1902) turns out to be a blend of Verne and Wells and who knows what else.
The squabbling between Verne and Wells sounds pretty funny to me. But even if Verne had too high an opinion of his own cooky science, I confess I prefer him greatly to Wells. At least he remained a consummate storyteller all his career; Wells had an epiphany of sorts and started taking seriously his role as Prophet of Scientific Utopia.
ReplyDeleteI've always like this particular dusting down from George Orwell:
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws
Wells definitely shrivels at some point - quite a ways after his best early novels, I think. Orwell is pounding on that later Wells, Wells the public institution.
ReplyDeleteThat's my point, that late Wells is the guy who really believed his own hype. I thought early Wells, the storyteller, was infinitely better.
DeleteA charming footnote to the Méliès: the Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón made his own version of "A Trip to the Moon" in 1908. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwvVnXtobwU
ReplyDeleteI think Wells got off the track with that tedious "Outline of History," and all the polemics that followed it. He could have been writing novels instead.
Hey, it's in color, too. I wonder what the point was of making such a close copy.
ReplyDeleteMoney, I guess. Those hand-tinted films are delectable. Chomón's films are worth seeking out; he didn't always copy Méliès, though he worked in a similar vein.
ReplyDeleteSeems like an expensive way to make money, is all I'm saying. I guess that could be the motto of a lot of filmmakers.
ReplyDeleteI will look for more Chomón, thanks. Méliès is a great favorite of mine.
I guess you did avoid Ibsen for several days with this "fluff." I've always considered the giant gun as something close to what really happens with rockets. Just invert the gun, replace the bullet with other fuel and you have a rocket more or less, no?
ReplyDeleteBut the means of travel is always the least interesting part of this kind of story. It's what you find on the moon that makes the story fun.
Arthur C. Clarke, in the Everyman introduction, says that Verne's method is fine "as long as one neglected air resistance and the minor problem that the would-be astronauts would be converted into instant wall-to-wall carpet by the initial acceleration" (xxxii). So I guess there is some difference from a rocket. Clarke also says that Cavor should use his physics-defying metal to create a perpetual motion dynamo rather than fly to he moon. What a killjoy, that Arthur C. Clarke.
ReplyDelete