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

[nwhyte]

Opening of the third chapter:I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea of the sphere. He had had intimations of it before, but at the time it seemed to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow for tea, and on the way he fell humming. Suddenly he shouted, “That’s it! That finishes it! A sort of roller

Comments

[inuitmonster]

When I read this recently I was unprepared for what a complete dickhead the narrator (Bedford) is. The bit towards the end about the young lad being carried away to his death by the sphere - I didn't feel that as being played for laughs, it's more you get a sense of how self-absorbed Bedford is that the death of the boy is something of no great consequence to him.

One thing I found very interesting when I re-read C.S. Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet" was the discovery that the two men who kidnap Ransom (Devine and Weston, if I remember correctly) and take him to Mars in their spherical spaceship are deliberately constructed as analogues of Bedford and Cavor. With Devine he only slightly has to ramp up the unpleasantness, but with Weston he transforms Cavor into a caricature of an obsessive scientist devoid of normal feelings. Lewis seems to have a bit of a thing about Wells (an analogue of whom turns up as the senior villain in "That Hideous Strength").

[nwhyte]

On the boy carried off by the capsulre, yeah, you have a point; I was reading it in the context of the Invisible Man mocking the yokels as well.

I think that's absolutely true about Lewis deliberately pushing back against Wells, who he would have seen as a creature of monstrous evil. I guess Cavor is one of the archetypes of sf. No doubt other obsessed scientists had been written about before, but I'm actually struggling to think of any from, say, Jules Verne.