This is the 5th in a series of post examining the LibriVox audiobooks that feature characters found in Alan Moore’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Unlike the others, this doesn’t only speak to a character, but rather to a fictional material and its inventor. Cavorite and Dr. Cavor both originate in the 1901 novel The First Men In The Moon by H.G. Wells. It tells the tale of Cavor, and his adventures with this new material. Cavorite can shield any object coated in it from gravity. Thus it flings anything it is attached to into space. In the novel Dr. Cavor and his crew use Cavorite to build a spherical spaceship, which they use to travel to and land on the Moon. Alan Moore has a very different use for Cavorite in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He also gives Dr. Cavor a first name, “Selwyn” – that’s something that Wells himself neglected to do.
The First Men In The Moon
By H.G. Wells; Read by Mark F. Smith
Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 8 Hours 3 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: November 6, 2007
Britain won the Moon Race! Decades before Neal Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind” two intrepid adventurers from Lympne, England, journeyed there using not a rocket, but an antigravity coating. Mr. Bedford, who narrates the tale, tells of how he fell in with eccentric inventor Mr. Cavor, grew to believe in his researches, helped him build a sphere for traveling in space, and then partnered with him in an expedition to the Moon. What they found was fantastic! There was not only air and water, but the Moon was honeycombed with caverns and tunnels in which lived an advanced civilization of insect-like beings. While Bedford is frightened by them and bolts home, Cavor stays and is treated with great respect. So why didn’t Armstrong and later astronauts find the evidence of all this? Well, according to broadcasts by Cavor over the newly-discovered radio technology, he told the Selenites too much about mankind, and apparently, they removed the welcome mat!
Podcast feed:
http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/the-first-men-in-the-moon-by-hg-wells.xml
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Posted by Jesse Willis