Selenites Among Giant Mushrooms – Le Voyage dans la Lune 1902

Startlingly imaginative for 1902, this dense black-and-white engraving depicts human explorers dwarfed by enormous lunar mushrooms inside a cavernous moon interior, surrounded by Selenite creatures. The grotesque, fleshy fungal forest feels genuinely alien — not the barren moonscape most would expect — while squat humanoid figures navigate the chaotic underground world. The cross-hatched engraving technique gives the scene a claustrophobic, baroque density that prefigures decades of pulp alien-world imagery.