When penniless businessman Mr Bedford retreats to Kent to write a play, he encounters Dr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist who has invented a material that counteracts gravity. This discovery enables the two men to set off on a fantastic journey to the Moon. But they are not prepared for what they find there - a world of freezing nights, boiling days and danger from a sinister alien lifeform, the selenites, creatures who have developed an intricate hierarchical society beneath the lunar surface. The First Men in the Moon ignited speculation in nineteenth century society concerning what lies on and beneath the surface of the Moon. By turns amusing, thrilling and stimulating, the novel is a classic of its genre. This volume also contains another of Wells's fascinating thought-provoking fantasies: A Modern Utopia in which two travellers fall into a space-warp and find themselves upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government. AUTHOR: H. G. Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) is famously often referred to as 'the father of science fiction' but Wells's phenomenal imagination ranged far and wide and included works of comic social realism. Such is Wells's facility with story-telling that well over a century after their publication, that his stories are as fresh and compelling to us today as they would have been when his initial readers first turned their pages, often in astonishment and frequently in amusement.