At the village of Lympne, on the south coast of England, the failed playwright Mr Bedford meets the brilliant inventor Mr Cavor, and together they invade the moon. The First Men in the Moon is an inspired and imaginative fantasy of space travel and alien life, a satire of turn-of-the-century Britain

Professor Simon J. James, Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Durham. James is editor of The Wellsian, the scholarly journal of the H. G. Wells Society, and the author of Maps of Utopia (2012), the first full-length study of the aesthetics of Wells's writing.