Foreword
To be honest, I can’t believe you’re reading this, unless you already finished the story and went backward to the foreword. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s okay, this will still be here—go forward to the story, then back up to the foreword, because let’s face it, no other path makes sense when it comes to reading the work of the man considered the Father of Science Fiction: Jules Verne.
Verne was a French novelist, born in 1828, who created such visionary tales as Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. A prolific writer, he also wrote short stories, essays, nonfiction, and even plays. Sometimes, it seems his most popular works are all we remember of him, but From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and the sequel Round the Moon (1870) really shouldn’t be missed. The two stories are properly married here for your enjoyment as From the Earth to the Moon and Round the Moon—published together as they always should be.
Produced directly after the American Civil War, these stories display Verne’s genius for invention and imagining a future that might well come to pass. Here he takes the weapons developed for warfare and illuminates how those artifacts of destruction launch the first astronauts into a trip from our lonely blue marble to a lunar destination that, at the time, was purely science fiction. The machinations and missteps of the characters go from the wild speculation of how large a cannon to make to the deeply personal matter of a duel.
Verne’s imaginings are a testament to his skill as a creative storyteller. Taking something as tragic as a civil war and weaving a tale of wonder, awe, and hope for a better tomorrow is how we ended up, only a hundred or so years later, actually landing on the Moon. If science fiction is, in fact, the literature of ideas, then this story (among others) likely influenced H. G. Wells in his own writing, and later, Neil Armstrong, as he took that one small step for man, which was a giant leap for mankind.
Verne wrote, “What human being would ever have conceived the idea of such a journey? And, if such a person really existed, he must be an idiot, whom one would shut up in a lunatic ward…” I don’t suspect Verne was the first author to wonder about that, and I know for a fact he wasn’t the last.
Now, here we are in 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, in what is perhaps one of the most divided times in the history of the United States since the dark days of the Civil War. I would say that we must continue to ask what now, and what next. Let’s let the lunatics and the idiots keep imagining and writing, keep dreaming of what the future might be, so that whatever journey they take us on might someday be history.
The gift of Verne’s story isn’t that we haven’t gotten to the Moon yet. It’s that we have, and yet still want to go back. These stories are both science fiction and history, imagined in a time when such a thing seemed unimaginable, and relived by readers, knowing that even today, such a journey is fraught with danger, and those who travel are heroic wanderers, blazing a trail into the future.
Enjoy!
— Russell Davis, 2021