The first men in the moon

I found this to be rather a plotless book - it seems to be more of an exercise in descriptive writing than a proper story. There doesn't seem to be much of an attempt to make the science sound realistic - it ends up seeming much more like magic (of course I'm writing with hindsight, over 35 years after we actually went to the moon). But the real problem is that the characters seem to be more spectators than anything else - there's a bit of action in the middle, but even then I didn't feel any empathy with the main characters

The last few chapters of the book are radio transmissions recieved with no chance of returning any messages - spectators again. It seems that Well's wants to put in a description of an alternative form of society, even if it doesn't fit in with the plot of the book. It's probably best to see this book in that light - comparing it with Gulliver's Travels or Thomas More's Utopia (The Selenites, like the Utopians, use gold chains on their prisoners), rather than as a work which was predicting what science might lead to in the future.