The First Men in the Moon.

Published in 1901, The First Men in the Moon stands among H.G. Wells's finest scientific romances and the last of the great cycle of imaginative novels - The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds - that established the foundations of modern science fiction. The novel tells the story of a journey to the Moon undertaken by its two protagonists: a businessman narrator, Mr. Bedford, who has retreated to the Kentish coast to write a play, and an eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor, whose chance meeting with him draws Bedford into one of the most audacious journeys in nineteenth-century fiction. Cavor has discovered a substance he calls Cavorite, capable of screening matter from the force of gravity, and with it the two men construct a sphere in which they sail across the void to the lunar surface. There Bedford and Cavor discover that the Moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilisation of insect-like creatures they call "Selenites" - a vast, hive-like society dwelling in the lunar interior, organized into castes of terrible specialization and ruled by the disembodied intellect of the Grand Lunar. Out of this premise Wells fashions both a thrilling adventure and a sustained satire on imperial ambition, industrial society, and the human capacity for violence, the encounter between Bedford's grasping earthly instincts and the alien order of the Moon serving as a mirror in which terrestrial civilization is found wanting. Filmed memorably by Nathan Juran in 1964 with effects by Ray Harryhausen, the novel remains one of the most inventive and unsettling of all imagined voyages beyond the Earth.