Jules Verne - From the Earth to the Moon

JULES VERNE s life was characterized by a love for the sea, travel, and adventure. He was born into a family with a seafaring tradition in Nantes, France, in 1828. At an early age he tried to run off and ship out as a cabin boy but was stopped and returned to his family. Verne was sent to Paris to study law, but once there, he quickly fell in love with the theater. He was soon writing plays and opera librettos, and his first play was produced in 1850. When he refused his fathers entreaties to return to Nantes and practice law, his allowance was cut off, and he was forced to make his living by selling stories and articles.

Verne combined his gift for exotic narratives with an interest in the latest scientific discoveries. He spent long hours in the Paris libraries studying geology, astronomy, and engineering. Soon he was turning out imaginative stories such as Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), which were immensely popular all over the world. After From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Verne received letters from travelers wishing to sign up for the next lunar expedition. His ability to envision the next stage in mans technological process and his childlike wonder at the possibilities produced 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and Michael Strogoff (1876). His biggest success came with Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).

Vernes books made him famous and rich. In 1876 he bought a large steam yacht, outfitted with a cabin in which he could write more comfortably than on shore. He sailed from one European port to another and was lionized everywhere he went. His books were widely translated, dramatized, and later filmed. He died at Amiens in 1905.

FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON
A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
From the Earth to the Moon was first published in 1865
Bantam Pathfinder edition published January 1967
Bantam Classic edition / June 1993
Bantam Classic reissue / October 2008

Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved

Introduction copyright 1993 by Abbenford Associates
Translation copyright 1967 by Lowell Bair

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78516-9

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 25

W ONDERTHAT is the key to understanding Jules Verne, the first novelist to claim excitement and awe as his territory. Because he wrote with a sure sense of the wonders that lay beyond everyday life, Verne was considered a childrens writer. But his work has outlasted vast numbers of serious novels about character and setting that are now mere historical curiosities.

We live in a time when the first expedition to the moon, in 1969, is a fading memory. Why, then, read about past visions of flying to the moon? After all, we know how it really happenedthe ending is no surprise.

Vernes answer would be, Because the sense of possibility must be kept alive. Unlike yesterdays yellowing newspapers, the quality of wonder does not fade. Verne believed wonder to be an emotion that grows out of our sense of adventure and inspires us to reach our fullest potential. Though men have now traveled to the moon, the ideas and attitudes Jules Verne packed into From the Earth to the Moon are still alive today. And the novel even contains a prediction that may yet be fulfilled.

Verne invented modern science fiction. Others had written fantastic novels and stories using elements of science, such as Mary Shelleys dark, brooding gothic novel, Frankenstein. But Jules Verne devised science fictionstories with the scientific content in the foreground, as much a character as any person. More than any other figure of the nineteenth century, he saw the possibilities of the soaring century to comeand actually made things happen by igniting the imaginations of people everywhere.

For decades Verne was the best known of all French authors, valued not so much for his plots but for his ideas. He labored to infuse his novels with the feeling that these events could happen no matter how impossible they seemed at first glance. From the Earth to the Moon, first published in 1865, provides some excellent examples of this technique.

Verne had great faith in the growing potential of the still-young United States, and often predicted that it would lead the world in the following century. So when thinking about going to the moon, Verne picked the United States for his setting. The Yankees, the worlds best mechanics, are engineers the way Italians are musicians and Germans are metaphysicians: by birth. He wrote the book while the bloodiest battles of the Civil War still raged, yet was able to look beyond the ongoing American agony and envision a postwar future.

The members of the fictional Baltimore Gun Club are restless for activity. Its leader, the man with a grand ideaa typical Verne herois an anomaly at the Gun Club: all his limbs were intact. The image of hobbled veterans making a huge leap to another world is Vernes way of showing how limitations can be overcomeby work, will, and wonder. His Gun Club dreamers, aware of the latest scientific developments, know that the mathematician Carl Gauss has already proposed signaling to possible inhabitants of the moon and Mars by building giant stone triangles on the earth that could be seen from a vast distance. But mere signals would not be enough for Vernes heroes, who feel in their bones that by dreaming as exactlyas precisely and scientificallyas possible, they can live up to the full possibilities of their lives. This basic theme lights up over a hundred of his extraordinary voyage novels.

But the members of the Baltimore Gun Club arent the usual run of aimless, romantic nineteenth-century dreamers. Vernes menthis was long before women aspired to such thingsare relentlessly practical. Early on they consider a story by Edgar Allan Poe (a writer Verne admired) in which a man floats to the moon in a balloon filled with a gas drawn from nitrogen and thirty-seven times lighter than hydrogen. This is an insiders joke. Nitrogen, the most plentiful gas in our own atmosphere, is already far heavier than hydrogen. Nobody could extract a lighter gas from it without breaking up the atomsand still it would be heavier than hydrogen.

Here and elsewhere Verne mocks his eras great interest in balloon sailing to the planets. It is now hard to comprehend that most people of that time had no idea what outer space meant. To them, balloonswhich had just begun to be used to flywere a logical way to travel to the crescent they could plainly see waiting in the sky. They never doubted that there would be air available throughout such a journeywasnt there plenty of it here? Balloons rise because they contain gases lighter than air. Few popular writers realized that because space is a vacuum, this doesnt work.

In 1865 there were five other books on interplanetary themes published in French, including Voyage to Venus, An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, Voyage to the Moon, and even a survey by an astronomer,