In their attempt to find their way back to the surface and to their sphere, they come upon some Selenites carving up mooncalves but fight their way past. In their flight they discover that gold is common on the moon. Bedford and Cavor break out of captivity beneath the surface of the moon and flee, killing several Selenites. They wander drunkenly until they encounter a party of six extraterrestrials, who capture them.The insectoid lunar natives (referred to as 'Selenites', after Selene, the moon goddess) are part of a complex and technologically sophisticated society that lives underground, but this is revealed only in radio communications received from Cavor after Bedford's return to earth. At first they hide and crawl about, but growing hungry partake of some 'monstrous coralline growths' of fungus that inebriate them. They encounter 'great beasts', 'monsters of mere fatness', that they dub 'mooncalves', and five-foot-high 'Selenites' tending them. They hear for the first time a mysterious booming coming from beneath their feet. Bedford and Cavor leave the capsule, but in romping about get lost in the rapidly growing jungle. On the way to the moon, they experience weightlessness, which Bedford finds 'exceedingly restful'.On the surface of the moon the two men discover a desolate landscape, but as the sun rises, the thin, frozen atmosphere vaporizes and strange plants begin to grow with extraordinary rapidity. Cavour hits upon the idea of a spherical spaceship made of 'steel, lined with glass', and with sliding 'windows or blinds' made of cavorite by which it can be steered, and persuades a reluctant Bedford to undertake a voyage to the moon Cavor is certain there is no life there. Bedford sees in the commercial production of cavorite a possible source of 'wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we fancied we might own and order the whole world'. When a sheet of cavorite is prematurely processed, it makes the air above it weightless and shoots off into space.

Bedford befriends Cavor when he learns he is developing a new material, cavorite, which can negate the force of gravity.

After two weeks Bedford accosts the man, who proves to be a reclusive physicist named Mr.

He is bothered every afternoon, however, at precisely the same time, by a passer-by making odd noises. Bedford rents a small countryside house in Lympne, in Kent, where he wants to work in peace. The narrator is a London businessman who withdraws to the countryside to write a play, by which he hopes to alleviate his financial problems. Bedford and Cavor discover that the moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization of insect-like creatures they call 'Selenites'. Wells, who called it one of his 'fantastic stories'.The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon undertaken by the two protagonists, a businessman narrator, Mr. The First Men in the Moon is a scientific romance published in 1901 by the English author H.

The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells