Mr. Bedford, an aspiring playwright, moves to the British countryside in hope of writing a successful play that will cure his financial troubles. There, he becomes acquainted with Mr. Cavor, an eccentric and reclusive scientist, who hopes to create an anti-gravitational material.

After the two men accidentally create the material, they decide to use it to land on the Moon—Cavor motivated by expanding the realms of knowledge, and Bedford by the prospective mining of lunar minerals. There they meet an intelligent civilization of arthropoids whom they name the “Selenites.”

First serialized between November 1900 and June 1901, the novel was published in a single volume the same year. By contrasting Selenite society with the society of Victorian England, Wells criticizes Victorian mores and professes eugenic and socialist ideas.