First Men in the Moon and the Sea Lady

The First Men in the Moon is the last in a series of scientific romances begun by Wells with The Time Machine. In the opinion of many, it is also the last in a series of pessimistic and anti-utopian novels before Wells took up the tone of an optimistic and utopian social prophet with Anticipations. The present critical edition of First Men questions that opinion. The lunar utopia described is far from a satire on the industrial order as many critics claim, but in historical context is instead related to the international scientific management movement, stemming from the Saint-Simonian school of socialism. This critical edition shows how First Men consciously builds on the whole literary tradition of moon voyages. Much attention has been paid to the scientific romance novels of H.G. Wells, a founder of modern science fiction and one of the genre's greatest writers. In comparison, little attention has been given by critics to his works of fantasy, which in the opinion of many, are just as artistic and worthy of study. This work, the seventh in The Annotated H.G. Wells series, takes a critical look at Wells' little known fantasy The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine, which is a parable of dark foreboding that unveils the nothingness of utopian dreams and foreshadows Franz Kafka's dark fables of the totalitarian age. A lengthy introduction by the editor provides a comprehensive overview of the text and the story of The Sea Lady, and serves to explain the ideas of civil death and every citizen's acting as a public servant, and the concept of totalitarian metaphysics, which deals with a revolt against the limits of the human condition. This work provides a complete, extensively annotated text of the 1902 London first edition of The Sea Lady. Prepared by the world's leading Wellsian scholar, the volume also provides germane appendices and a bibliography.