The First Men in the Moon
- 238
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
- Film 1964 +3
- On screen
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Our view
“The First Men in the Moon” is an inventive early space adventure whose imagination still impresses. Bedford, a businessman hoping for profit, flies to the Moon with an eccentric scientist and his gravity-blocking invention, and finds an advanced civilisation of insect-like Selenites underground. Some readers find the voyage and the first scenes on the Moon thrilling but the later chapters slow. A rewarding classic for anyone curious how space travel was imagined before it existed.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The First Men in the Moon by the English author H. G. Wells is a science fiction novel about a journey to the Moon by two Englishmen who discover that a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilisation of insect-like creatures ("Selenites") inhabits the lunar interior. The first-person narrator Mr. Bedford, a businessman, recounts his adventure with an eccentric scientist, who has invented a gravity-blocking substance (cavorite) that the pair then use to construct a spherical spacecraft to reach the Moon, hoping to find valuable minerals. The work was originally serialised in The Strand Magazine (UK) and The Cosmopolitan (USA) from November 1900 to June 1901 and was published in hardcover book form in 1901. Wells called it one of his "fantastic stories".
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen 4 times — from 1902 to 2010.
- Short filmA Trip to the MoonIMDb
- FilmFirst Men in the MoonIMDb
- FilmThe First Men in the MoonIMDb
- TV filmThe First Men in the MoonIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 6.9 across 86 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 37% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Science fiction average of 7.8. That is how 7.5 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 6.5 | 15 | 17% |
| Hardcover | 7.0 | 71 | 83% |
Frequently asked
How long is The First Men in the Moon?
It has 238 pages — shorter than 88% of the ranked books in Science fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Science fiction — with scores between 7.4 and 7.5, closest to this book.
