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In the aftermath of the US Civil War, the nation's artillery engineers are despondent that they will no longer have such rich opportunities to build massive killing machines... until their trade association, the Gun Club of Baltimore, decides to start an extraordinary project to build a gun that can shoot a cannonball to the Moon. They carry it out with the slightly insane gusto characteristic of Americans, motivated by murderous resentments, a love of excitement and celebrity, and notions of technological manifest destiny. But to elevate the project from a merely audacious engineering exercise to a seeming suicide mission, by substituting a crewed projectile... that level of insanity requires a Frenchman.
(Warning: the following includes spoilers for a couple of 19th-century novels. They're the sort where knowing the ending doesn't really hurt the enjoyment.)
Jules Verne wrote a lot of early science-fiction/techno-thriller/"extraordinary voyage" books, but only a few of them were the top-tier ones that get adapted all the time (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days), and many others are considered minor works and have been nearly forgotten.
And then, somewhere in between, there's Verne's moon voyage, which was a two-parter (a fact that many descriptions of the story seem to omit, lumping them together under the first volume's title). From the Earth to the Moon covers the project to build and fire the Gun Club's titanic moon launcher, a cannon buried vertically in the Earth in central Florida, and it ends in a cliffhanger after the gun is fired, the projectile's ultimate fate unknown. Round the Moon moves the POV to the interior of Verne's spacecraft, and describes the circumlunar adventure of the three astronauts and what became of them.
This was my favorite Verne story for a long time when I was a kid--and I specifically preferred Round the Moon, the second half, because that was the actual travelogue-like story of the space voyage, with lots of leisurely infodumps about traveling in space. At that age, I ate that kind of thing up. I recently re-read these, and I read them for the first time in the original French, thanks to Project Gutenberg and the wonderful ability of e-books to instantly give you pop-up dictionary definitions of unfamiliar words. I actually think e-books may be the best way to read things in a language that isn't your native one.
Shooting the Moon
To me today, From the Earth to the Moon actually was the more entertaining read of the two. A thing that kind of went over my head as a kid was the extent to which the first volume was written as a comedy, a half-mocking, half-admiring satire on Americans--their enthusiasm for forming ad-hoc organizations run on Robert's Rules of Order (perhaps a lost characteristic?), for building giant machines and for killing each other. The Gun Club's meeting hall is described as a kind of temple of firearms with columns and ornamentation formed out of howitzers and rifles. It's wild and hilarious.
But Verne made his most audacious lunatic French. Up to the midpoint of From the Earth to the Moon, the protagonists are the Gun Club's visionary President Impey Barbicane, a tall Yankee with a stovepipe hat and chin whiskers, and his excitable sidekick J. T. Maston. Serving as a shadowy antagonist is the project's only naysayer in the entire United States, an armor designer named Nicholl who, over the course of the war, has grown to hate Barbicane with all his heart, not because of any Union/Confederate split, but because of the eternal contest between guns and plate armor, presumably sold to both sides all around. Barbicane has refused a public contest to pit Nicholl's latest invention against his own, and the end of the war has prevented a demonstration in battle; Nicholl feels deprived of satisfaction. But Verne kicks up the energy level of his story midway through by introducing a dashing and flippant French daredevil named Michel Ardan (possibly partly inspired by the great photographer Nadar, who took some of the first aerial photos from a balloon). Ardan's precise profession is unclear but we're told he's already internationally famous for his wild adventures. Now he wants to ride the Gun Club's cannonball to the Moon, and seems unconcerned with such details as being smashed to jam by the launch or being unable to breathe when he gets there.
In Verne's comical America, once sufficiently daft giant projects are proposed, they immediately fire the universal public imagination to such a degree that they can't not happen. So the Gun Club, having already built their mega-gun, sets about making the projectile habitable. Meanwhile, the feud between Barbicane and Nicholl, who's placed large public bets that the project is hopeless, escalates to the level of a duel, carried out in what Verne imagines to be the American manner: more of a redneck-"Most Dangerous Game" human-hunt in the wilds of Florida. The gallant M. Ardan, worried that this business will kill the whole Moon project, intervenes at the climactic moment and converts the duel into the recruitment of a three-man crew: Barbicane and Nicholl are going to settle the whole thing for themselves by going with him to the Moon!
Much of the book is taken up by the planning and construction of the giant gun, and Verne is fascinated by the organizational and logistical details of how this gets done. For all that, it actually is a pretty breezy read.
Prescience?
Round the Moon is a bit rougher going unless read with the attitude of me aged about 13, capable of extracting sensawunda from the driest infodumps. Having somehow survived the firing of the cannon (Verne's mechanism for this is fairly unconvincing, but at least he attempts an explanation), Ardan, Barbicane and Nicholl come to in what amounts to a richly provisioned padded cell hurtling through space. They have no control to speak of over their trajectory, but busy themselves with surviving the trip at least as far as landing. A chance close encounter with a second, tiny satellite of Earth (which some scientists of Verne's time apparently claimed to have discovered) alters their trajectory to the point that it's circumlunar rather than a one-way trip to the lunar surface, a prospect that disappoints the intrepid travelers greatly, but does raise the possibility that Verne could suppose they returned to tell the tale.
I feel as if these books were, in my childhood, more widely described than read, and it was always in light of the actual Apollo Moon missions of the late sixties and early seventies. Lots of authors took it upon themselves to describe the ways in which Verne's story was a prescient prefiguring of Apollo. Some of these, such as names of characters resembling those of Project Apollo figures, were meaningless, cherry-picked coincidences on about the level of "Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln!!" Sometimes Verne's space voyage was likened to Apollo 8 (the first circumlunar trip), sometimes to Apollo 11 (the first landing). In terms of events, the closest match was really Apollo 13--a landing mission that became a hairy free-return circumlunar voyage after a mishap.
Other points of prescience arose from basic physics and the fact that Verne was trying his imperfect best to write a technically plausible story. The energy densities necessary to get people to the Moon mean that the weapons industry will be a natural driver of space travel, somewhat as it was in real life. One main element of Verne's "prescience" was that he correctly guessed the people to do it would be American. Given that, such details as Texas and Florida being prime contenders for the launch site are not coincidences, but follow directly from the science.
Wrestling with plausibility
All that said... Verne does get some stuff wrong that he could have gotten right, aside from the things he had to get wrong out of narrative necessity, like not smashing his space voyagers to meat sauce. He doesn't quite understand how free-fall works. He knows that objects tossed gently out of the projectile (animal lovers beware--this includes a dead dog) will seem to float along with it, yet he doesn't extend this reasoning to the interior. Barbicane, Nicholl and Ardan walk around on the floor of their spacecraft according to the strength of gravitational force wherever they happen to be, and experience weightlessness only at the neutral point where the gravity of Earth and Moon balance out. The projectile tends to naturally orient itself like a pendulum so that the heavier bottom points toward the stronger gravitational attractor; this isn't quite right.
But he's trying. Verne clearly either did the math or had someone do it for him, on many points, and, boy, he wants to show you. Since his travelers from this point on have no actual control over their fate, they seek to understand it instead, and Barbicane and Nicholl, having completely forgotten their enmity from the previous book, do a lot of calculating and theorizing. Meanwhile, Michel Ardan turns into the comic relief and reader-surrogate who always says the equivalent of "Give it to me in words of one syllable, Professor!" in between poetic speculations about what the Moon might be like.
And concerning the Moon, there's another tension. Verne had an early version of the hard-SF fan's disdain for other people who attempted to perpetrate science fiction without being as rigorous about it as he was. He wanted a story heavily grounded in reality, to the extent he could make it. So he couldn't be true to himself and get too fanciful, with some pulp adventure among the bug-eyed Selenites. But at the same time, astronauts just asphyxiating on a dead, inert Moon is boring and sad. So he had to strike a balance, which he does by being a bit of a tease. Our heroes never actually land on the Moon, they just go around it. And they've unfortunately planned their trip for a time when the Moon is full, so the unseen far side is shrouded in darkness when they pass over, and there are all manner of speculations about how it might be different from the near side. Suddenly, they are afforded a fleeting glimpse of it by the light of an inexplicably exploding meteoroid, and for an instant, it appears they might be looking at a habitable, life-bearing world--on the far side, there seems to be a substantial atmosphere, clouds, liquid water and forests! But the vision fades, and they're not sure they saw what they saw.
Over the near side, the characters make detailed observations of lots of lunar features that Verne knows from the literature, and about those, he infodumps, and infodumps, and infodumps. It's a 19th-century thing and you have to roll with it. He subscribes to some theories of the time now known to be wrong, such as that the craters were mostly volcanic cones rather than impact features. But he's describing his contemporary science about the Moon as well as he can, and extrapolating only modestly.
The books had nicely done engraved illustrations, and it's interesting to see how many of them especially in Round the Moon are fanciful depictions of things the characters describe in idle musings, rather than of literal events. That's one way to make the story less dry.
I enjoyed reading these books again, and reading them in the original for the first time. Verne was not a master stylist; his prose is workmanlike and translation didn't really ruin it, per se. But I was able to actually confirm that. I've got some more Verne from Gutenberg to read.
(Warning: the following includes spoilers for a couple of 19th-century novels. They're the sort where knowing the ending doesn't really hurt the enjoyment.)
Jules Verne wrote a lot of early science-fiction/techno-thriller/"extraordinary voyage" books, but only a few of them were the top-tier ones that get adapted all the time (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days), and many others are considered minor works and have been nearly forgotten.
And then, somewhere in between, there's Verne's moon voyage, which was a two-parter (a fact that many descriptions of the story seem to omit, lumping them together under the first volume's title). From the Earth to the Moon covers the project to build and fire the Gun Club's titanic moon launcher, a cannon buried vertically in the Earth in central Florida, and it ends in a cliffhanger after the gun is fired, the projectile's ultimate fate unknown. Round the Moon moves the POV to the interior of Verne's spacecraft, and describes the circumlunar adventure of the three astronauts and what became of them.
This was my favorite Verne story for a long time when I was a kid--and I specifically preferred Round the Moon, the second half, because that was the actual travelogue-like story of the space voyage, with lots of leisurely infodumps about traveling in space. At that age, I ate that kind of thing up. I recently re-read these, and I read them for the first time in the original French, thanks to Project Gutenberg and the wonderful ability of e-books to instantly give you pop-up dictionary definitions of unfamiliar words. I actually think e-books may be the best way to read things in a language that isn't your native one.
Shooting the Moon
To me today, From the Earth to the Moon actually was the more entertaining read of the two. A thing that kind of went over my head as a kid was the extent to which the first volume was written as a comedy, a half-mocking, half-admiring satire on Americans--their enthusiasm for forming ad-hoc organizations run on Robert's Rules of Order (perhaps a lost characteristic?), for building giant machines and for killing each other. The Gun Club's meeting hall is described as a kind of temple of firearms with columns and ornamentation formed out of howitzers and rifles. It's wild and hilarious.
But Verne made his most audacious lunatic French. Up to the midpoint of From the Earth to the Moon, the protagonists are the Gun Club's visionary President Impey Barbicane, a tall Yankee with a stovepipe hat and chin whiskers, and his excitable sidekick J. T. Maston. Serving as a shadowy antagonist is the project's only naysayer in the entire United States, an armor designer named Nicholl who, over the course of the war, has grown to hate Barbicane with all his heart, not because of any Union/Confederate split, but because of the eternal contest between guns and plate armor, presumably sold to both sides all around. Barbicane has refused a public contest to pit Nicholl's latest invention against his own, and the end of the war has prevented a demonstration in battle; Nicholl feels deprived of satisfaction. But Verne kicks up the energy level of his story midway through by introducing a dashing and flippant French daredevil named Michel Ardan (possibly partly inspired by the great photographer Nadar, who took some of the first aerial photos from a balloon). Ardan's precise profession is unclear but we're told he's already internationally famous for his wild adventures. Now he wants to ride the Gun Club's cannonball to the Moon, and seems unconcerned with such details as being smashed to jam by the launch or being unable to breathe when he gets there.
In Verne's comical America, once sufficiently daft giant projects are proposed, they immediately fire the universal public imagination to such a degree that they can't not happen. So the Gun Club, having already built their mega-gun, sets about making the projectile habitable. Meanwhile, the feud between Barbicane and Nicholl, who's placed large public bets that the project is hopeless, escalates to the level of a duel, carried out in what Verne imagines to be the American manner: more of a redneck-"Most Dangerous Game" human-hunt in the wilds of Florida. The gallant M. Ardan, worried that this business will kill the whole Moon project, intervenes at the climactic moment and converts the duel into the recruitment of a three-man crew: Barbicane and Nicholl are going to settle the whole thing for themselves by going with him to the Moon!
Much of the book is taken up by the planning and construction of the giant gun, and Verne is fascinated by the organizational and logistical details of how this gets done. For all that, it actually is a pretty breezy read.
Prescience?
Round the Moon is a bit rougher going unless read with the attitude of me aged about 13, capable of extracting sensawunda from the driest infodumps. Having somehow survived the firing of the cannon (Verne's mechanism for this is fairly unconvincing, but at least he attempts an explanation), Ardan, Barbicane and Nicholl come to in what amounts to a richly provisioned padded cell hurtling through space. They have no control to speak of over their trajectory, but busy themselves with surviving the trip at least as far as landing. A chance close encounter with a second, tiny satellite of Earth (which some scientists of Verne's time apparently claimed to have discovered) alters their trajectory to the point that it's circumlunar rather than a one-way trip to the lunar surface, a prospect that disappoints the intrepid travelers greatly, but does raise the possibility that Verne could suppose they returned to tell the tale.
I feel as if these books were, in my childhood, more widely described than read, and it was always in light of the actual Apollo Moon missions of the late sixties and early seventies. Lots of authors took it upon themselves to describe the ways in which Verne's story was a prescient prefiguring of Apollo. Some of these, such as names of characters resembling those of Project Apollo figures, were meaningless, cherry-picked coincidences on about the level of "Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln!!" Sometimes Verne's space voyage was likened to Apollo 8 (the first circumlunar trip), sometimes to Apollo 11 (the first landing). In terms of events, the closest match was really Apollo 13--a landing mission that became a hairy free-return circumlunar voyage after a mishap.
Other points of prescience arose from basic physics and the fact that Verne was trying his imperfect best to write a technically plausible story. The energy densities necessary to get people to the Moon mean that the weapons industry will be a natural driver of space travel, somewhat as it was in real life. One main element of Verne's "prescience" was that he correctly guessed the people to do it would be American. Given that, such details as Texas and Florida being prime contenders for the launch site are not coincidences, but follow directly from the science.
Wrestling with plausibility
All that said... Verne does get some stuff wrong that he could have gotten right, aside from the things he had to get wrong out of narrative necessity, like not smashing his space voyagers to meat sauce. He doesn't quite understand how free-fall works. He knows that objects tossed gently out of the projectile (animal lovers beware--this includes a dead dog) will seem to float along with it, yet he doesn't extend this reasoning to the interior. Barbicane, Nicholl and Ardan walk around on the floor of their spacecraft according to the strength of gravitational force wherever they happen to be, and experience weightlessness only at the neutral point where the gravity of Earth and Moon balance out. The projectile tends to naturally orient itself like a pendulum so that the heavier bottom points toward the stronger gravitational attractor; this isn't quite right.
But he's trying. Verne clearly either did the math or had someone do it for him, on many points, and, boy, he wants to show you. Since his travelers from this point on have no actual control over their fate, they seek to understand it instead, and Barbicane and Nicholl, having completely forgotten their enmity from the previous book, do a lot of calculating and theorizing. Meanwhile, Michel Ardan turns into the comic relief and reader-surrogate who always says the equivalent of "Give it to me in words of one syllable, Professor!" in between poetic speculations about what the Moon might be like.
And concerning the Moon, there's another tension. Verne had an early version of the hard-SF fan's disdain for other people who attempted to perpetrate science fiction without being as rigorous about it as he was. He wanted a story heavily grounded in reality, to the extent he could make it. So he couldn't be true to himself and get too fanciful, with some pulp adventure among the bug-eyed Selenites. But at the same time, astronauts just asphyxiating on a dead, inert Moon is boring and sad. So he had to strike a balance, which he does by being a bit of a tease. Our heroes never actually land on the Moon, they just go around it. And they've unfortunately planned their trip for a time when the Moon is full, so the unseen far side is shrouded in darkness when they pass over, and there are all manner of speculations about how it might be different from the near side. Suddenly, they are afforded a fleeting glimpse of it by the light of an inexplicably exploding meteoroid, and for an instant, it appears they might be looking at a habitable, life-bearing world--on the far side, there seems to be a substantial atmosphere, clouds, liquid water and forests! But the vision fades, and they're not sure they saw what they saw.
Over the near side, the characters make detailed observations of lots of lunar features that Verne knows from the literature, and about those, he infodumps, and infodumps, and infodumps. It's a 19th-century thing and you have to roll with it. He subscribes to some theories of the time now known to be wrong, such as that the craters were mostly volcanic cones rather than impact features. But he's describing his contemporary science about the Moon as well as he can, and extrapolating only modestly.
The books had nicely done engraved illustrations, and it's interesting to see how many of them especially in Round the Moon are fanciful depictions of things the characters describe in idle musings, rather than of literal events. That's one way to make the story less dry.
I enjoyed reading these books again, and reading them in the original for the first time. Verne was not a master stylist; his prose is workmanlike and translation didn't really ruin it, per se. But I was able to actually confirm that. I've got some more Verne from Gutenberg to read.