First Men in the Moon (1901)

An aspiring businessman stumbles upon Cavor, an eccentric genius. In a world still struggling to accept X-Rays and Radio Waves they construct a Gravity-Defying Sphere - and man finally lands on the dead surface of the moon. But with the first light of day the surface bursts into life. From the caves below come the Selenites, protean creatures, horrific in appearance, who adapt their shape to their function. Over them rules the Grand Lunar, a creature that is almost entirely brain . . . a brain of awesome power. Only one of the earthmen will return to tell the tale.

I doubt if even Wells imagined that, only twenty years after his death, men would actually be preparing to go to the moon; he would have been 103 - not an impossible age - at the time of the first landing. He would certainly have been delighted to know that when Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins returned to the earth, the book recording their personal stories would be called First on the Moon (Little Brown, 1970) . . . If, as Wells famously remarked, we win the 'race between education and catastrophe', space is where our future lies. There is one respect in which The First Men in the Moon is astonishingly up to date - even topical - as this exrtract demonstrates:

'The reader will no doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising out of an annuncement by Mr Nikola Tesla, the American electrical celebrity, the he had received a message from Mars. His announcement renewed attention to the fact . . . that from some unknown source in space, waves of electromagnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth.'

This message is really quite extraordinary, for several reasons - altogether apart from the ingenious manner in which Wells used a sensational news item to add a 'Live From the Moon' epilogue to his already published novel. For now, at the end of . . . (another) century a SETI (Search for Extra-terrestial Intelligence) programme is in full swing, scanning the electromagnetic spectrum for evidence of civilizations elesewhere in the universe. Tesla - an electrical genius, and one of the few real-life examples of a genuinely mad scientist - was of course talking nonsense. His 1900 equipment was far too insensitive to detect such radiation: it was not discovered until three decades later. But once again H.G. got there first.