Preface
Daniel Defoe, born in London in 1660, was the son of a butcher. He attended Morton's Academy, a school for non-Anglican Prostestants—“Dissenters”—at Newington Green with the intention of becoming a minister, but he changed his mind and instead became a hosiery merchant.
In 1688 Defoe took part in the Monmouth Rebellion, joining William III and his advancing army. The publication of the poem, The True Born Englishman (1701) made Defoe a favorite of the king since the poem criticized those were opposed to having a king of foreign birth.
The publication of Defoe's The Shortest Way by the Dissenters (1702) upset a large number of powerful people. In the pamphlet, Defoe, himself a Dissenter, demanded the savage suppression of dissent. The pamphlet was judged to be critical of the Anglican Church and Defoe was fined, put in the Charing Cross Pillory and then imprisoned at Newgate.
In 1703 Defoe was employd as a spy by a Tory government official named Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. With government support, Defoe began publishing a newspaper, The Review. Devoted to reporting on social and political issues, it appeared three times a week between 1704 and 1713. Defoe also wrote several pamphlets for Harley attacking his political opposition, the Whig party. Defoe was sued with the result that he found himself again in prison.
In 1719 Defoe turned to writing fiction. His fist novel was Robinson Crusoe (1719). It became an immediate best-seller, going through numerous printings in its first year. This was followed by Captain Singleton (1720), Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Captain Jack (1722), Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxanda (1724).
By the time Defoe died in 1731 he had also produced an immense body of non-fiction, eventually publishing more than 560 books and pamphlets. He is widely considered to be one of the first British novelists and a founder of British journalism
When Defoe published The Consolidator in 1705, he feared that it might lead him again to prison. Fortunately, his readers were not unduly shocked by his radically democratic view of English politics.
The Consolidator is included in this series as one of the best examples of that early type of space fiction that employed the device of a trip to the moon or another world as a means to satirize this one. In Defoe’s case, he used the imaginary voyage to comment on the intellectual and moral fads of his contemporaries and as a kind of autobiographical version of the events that led to his arrest for publishing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. What sets this book apart from similar works—other than the high quality of Defoe’s writing, of course—is his attention to scientific detail—at least comparitively. He was one of the first authors of interplanetary fiction to suggest making a journey to the moon by means of a mechanical device. In fact, his spacecraft, the epynomous Consolidator, was powered by an internal combustion engine and he afforded its passengers a safe voyage by placing them in an artificially induced state of hibernation.
—Ron Miller