Last and First Men
The most ambitious future history ever attempted, directly inspiring Clarke, Lem and Baxter, and establishing deep time as science fiction's playground.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is From the Earth to the Moon about?
With the American Civil War over, the gun-mad members of the Baltimore Gun Club face an existential crisis: nothing left to shoot. Their solution is to cast a nine-hundred-foot cannon, the Columbiad, and fire a projectile — swiftly upgraded to a crewed capsule — at the Moon. Verne plays it as both engineering prospectus and gleeful satire of American boosterism, and his calculations were eerily prescient: a Florida launch site, a three-man crew, splashdown at sea. The story concludes in the 1870 sequel Around the Moon.
Why it matters
The founding text of spaceflight fiction, cited as inspiration by rocketry pioneers Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth. The parallels with Apollo 11, a century later, remain startling.
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