The Selenites are one of the native races of the Earth's Moon. Selenites are insectoid, hive-mind creatures that live under the moon's surface in a complex and technologically sophisticated society.
History[]
The Selenites were first encountered by the human race in 1901 during Selwyn Cavor's lunar expedition. Initial contact was apparently hostile in which the British expedition were forced to leave the moon without Cavor, who was surrounded by the Selenites. Cavor then killed himself by stepping out of the Moon's atmosphere. Upon his death, the Selenites then believed Cavor and the other humans are divine beings sent to educate them and elevate their social consciousness. This encounter introduced the Selenites to their first conception of religion.
The Selenites froze Cavor's body and over the years it became a religious idol for them. When the body was stolen by the Lunites in 1964, the Selenites declared war on them to get Cavor's body back. Fearing the war would cause the inhabitants of the moon colonies to move to other regions they were not meant to discover yet, Prospero send Mina Murray, the Galley-Wag and his Dutch Dolls to the moon to stop the war. She succeeded in doing this by returning Cavor's body to the Selenites.
Selenites with their god, the frozen corpse of Selwyn Cavor, in 2010
In 2010, during Prospero's intentions to wipe out human civilization, the Selenites were manipulated to eliminate the human colonists on the moon. In which they misinterpret the transmissions from the Black Monoliths as commands from their idol of Selwyn Cavor to overrun the lunar colonies, leaving only the colonies' infrastructure and spaceships intact and to be taken over by the Lunites to be use in their invasion of Venus and Mars.
Source material[]
The Selenites were created by H.G. Wells, and appear in his novel The First Men in the Moon.