From the Earth to the Moon Read Free

industrial squalor, social dislocations. But he always saw fresh possibility looming beyond the troubles. Many of his inventions “came true,” whereas the other great founder of modern science fiction, H. G. Wells, played a bit looser with the facts and their implications. When Wells followed Verne, writing
The First Men in the Moon
(1901), he got his astronauts there with a metal that simply did away with the law of gravity—presto! Verne said dismissively, “I make use of physics. He invents … Show me this metal. Let him produce it!”
    Ever since he was a struggling writer, Verne intended to ground his fiction in scientific fact. Reflecting upon his ambitions in 1856, he wrote in his journal: “Not mere poetry, but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people, love giving way to deduction and other sources of ideas, style, subject, interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head …”
    This attention to detail, balanced by Verne’s soaring imagination, makes the book in your hands still exciting. He published it in the last year of the American Civil War, 1865, 104 years before we voyaged to the moon. By reliving the visions of yesterday, it teaches us a lot about
why
people spin great dreams. His characters seek to expand human horizons—both physical and conceptual.
    And what dreams Verne had! We can grasp how much he changed the world by recalling real events that appeared first as acts of imagination in his novels. The American submarine
Nautilus,
its name taken from
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
surfaced at the north pole and its captain (not named Nemo, alas) talked by radio with President Eisenhower less than a century after thenovel was published. The explorer Haroun Tazieff, a Verne fan who had read
Journey to the Center of the Earth,
climbed down into the rumbling throat of a volcano in Africa, seeking secrets of the earth’s core. An Italian venturer coasted over the icy Arctic wastes in a dirigible just as Verne proposed. A French explorer crawled into the caves of southern Europe, stumbled upon the ancient campgrounds of early man, and stood before underground lakes where mammoths once roasted over crackling fires—as Verne had envisioned. In 1877 Verne foresaw a journey through the entire solar system, a feat accomplished by NASA’s robot voyagers a century later.
    So he endures. Many of his precisely envisioned dreams will never find an echo in actual events. But Jules Verne saw huge possibility when others saw mere social mannerisms—the great concern of most nineteenth-century novels.
    Perhaps we can learn this from him: that potential lasts longer than details of the moment. And that wonder works.
    Gregory Benford
    November 1992

CHAPTER 1

THE GUN CLUB
    D URING THE Civil War in the United States an influential club was formed in Baltimore. The vigor with which the military instinct developed in that nation of shipowners, merchants, and mechanics is well known. Shopkeepers left their counters and became captains, colonels, and generals without ever having gone to West Point. They soon equaled their Old World colleagues in the “art of war” and, like them, won victories by lavishly expending ammunition, money, and men.
    But in the science of ballistics the Americans far surpassed the Europeans. Not that their guns attained a higher degree of perfection, but they were made much larger and therefore reached much greater ranges. When it comes to grazing fire, plunging fire, direct fire, oblique fire, or raking fire, the English, French, and Prussians have nothing to learn, but their cannons, howitzers, and mortars are only pocket pistols compared to the awesome engines of the American artillery.
    This should surprise no one. The Yankees, the world’s best mechanics, are engineers the way Italians are musicians and Germans are metaphysicians: by birth. Nothing could then be more natural than for them to bring their bold