WELLS, (H.G.)
The First Men in the Moon
London, George Newnes, 1901
8vo, dark blue cloth with gilt lettering and illustrations on spine and upper board, black end papers, frontispiece, [viii] -342 pp.; nice copy, edges and corners rubbed, spine ends bumped and frayed, gilt slightly fading
First UK edition in its first state of this early science-fiction classic by H.G. Wells (1866-1946). Illustrated with twelve b/w drawings by Claude Shepperson. Inspired by Jules Verne’s ‘Journey to the Moon’, it was originally published as a serial in The Strand Magazine in 1900 and first released in book form in New York, one month before the London edition. It was the first novel of Wells to be adapted to film, in 1919 by Gaumont. “These early ‘scientific romances’ remain unsurpassed for their imagination and visionary power. Where Wells’s contemporaries saw him as adding the scientific imagination to nineteenth-century romance, the twentieth century regarded him as the greatest of the forerunners of modern science fiction. His tales of future evolution, alien intelligence, interplanetary warfare and technological dystopia anticipated most of science fiction’s thematic repertoire.” (Literary Encyclopedia)
