The First Men in the Moon

[jmb2891]

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this thread, but I'll run with it.

A couple of weeks ago, it was my pleasure to discover, in one of my dad's old cabinets, a couple of H.G. Wells novels, one of them being The First Men in the Moon (the other being The Invisible Man), which, as many of you know, is what inspired the Astro Boy story Ivan the Fool (and partially its sequel The Hot Dog Corps).

Some similarities:
-Air 'freezes' at night and liquefies and becomes gas at sunrise
-Plants grow rapidly in the morning and shrivel up and die at night
-There is an abundance of valuable mineral/metals (gold in the novel and diamonds in Ivan)
-The inhabitants of the moon (who died out as stated in the Hot Dog Corps) had their civilization in underground caverns

All in all, it was very interesting book.

[jeffbert]

I totally enjoy that old science fiction literature, but could not recall whether it was this, or Verne's book that had those features. Tezuka drew upon many sources for his MIGHTY ATOM comics, & perhaps, even more for plots in the animated series than in the manga. With 193 B&W episodes, they soon exhausted the stories from MIGHTY ATOM comics, & had to find inspiration elsewhere.

[jmb2891]

^^In the intro to Ivan the Fool in the Dark Horse volumes, (4 I think?), Tezuka specifically names this book (he called Wells "that old sci-fi master), which is what made it catch my eye when I found it. I love reading Tezuka's little intros.
I've been getting into older authors in the past few months for some reason....

[Tetsuwan Atom]

I agree with that theory i'm a big H.G wells fan and have a good portion of his books thought until this point i have seen his work mostly thourgh movies maybe just because reading hunders of pages of heavy english text still goes a bit hard but i will eveantully go trough it

anyway what i wanted to say i think Wells early works are really much like tezuka, tezuka was inspired by metropolis and made his sci-fi triology around it in praticular the one with the same name knowing he was verry well aware of western culture since an early age he must of been aware of Wells maybe a was not praticular a fan but works like Prime Rose,Ode to kirihito,Astro Boy (in a way),the cratere,MW and some Phoenix stories
you name it do pretty much resemble each other until Wells was going more to politic's work without fiction and tried to change the world in a way.

Of course Tezuka also made works of a russian novelist and works like Faust,Adolf and Buddha so i'm not certain if he where really into it or just took a bit of everyone i just like to believe it since they are along with Verne my favourite historical persons.

And that it's a shame they never met each other if they really came to appricate each other's works i think they could have made some really epic work.

I know at least Verne loved Disney just like Tezuka did but he passed away in 1905 (also on a much to early age) so that was never meant to be.