Science fiction has gone a long way. Science itself has gone a long way. As science accelerated in its bull run over the past two centuries, so must sci-fi keep up. The form of the novel itself is a recent phenomenon compared to science and in the beginning, not many writers penned fiction through the lens of science, but it was only a matter of time before somebody did.
One of these early pioneers was Jules Verne, the French novelist who had given us fantastic adventure novels such as Around the World in 80 Days and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Adventure novels had never really had gone out of fashion, but they were a big thing back in the 1800s, as the novels reach the masses and everybody craves for the escapism of African rainforests, scorching deserts and the lunar landscapes of the moon, because why not?
In some ways, the venture into inserting scientific elements into the novel was literature’s own adventure, full of uncertain terrain and the formidable nemesis of scientists — errors. But what scientists have been perfect with their extrapolations from the beginning? Newton had been inaccurate, Einstein’s theory had been incomplete, but the knowledge they endowed to science had been necessary to advance mankind in leaps. So had Jules Verne had been to the genre.
The lunar showdown between man and moon
Although at the time of writing, the American Civil War was tearing the country between its two vertical poles, America in the story was at peace at the time the Gun Club proposed to shoot a projectile to the moon. The proposal by the Gun Club’s president, Barbicane, was met with an uproarious support by all parties and from punters all around the world. But where to start?
Barbicane and his team approached the issue logically, asking Cambridge to supply them with the information with the perfect date, trajectory, location and everything in between. The project is then carried out, but they must also resolve the mechanical issues of the canon, the projectile and the powder. However, there is also the question of money and who was willing to pay for the execution. Barbicane was able to surmount these issues and launch himself, a Frenchman in Ardan and his former nemesis Nicholls, to the moon.
In the sequel, Around the Moon, we see the travelers being launched from their capsule with their two dogs. Though they miraculously survived (as it would be debunked years later that they should have died at the moment of the launch), they came across earth’s second unproven and possibly fictional moon, which unfortunately carried their trajectory slightly away from their lunar destination. Thus, instead of landing on the moon, they were stuck in a perpetual orbit as the moon’s satellite. They must find a way, by luck or ingenuity, to return to earth by any means possible.
The moon is a bloody harsh mistress
We have come a long, long way. But this is not a criticism of Verne as a pioneer, because his books never fail to delight no matter how flawed they might be. But I can’t help comparing Verne’s work to the last book I read before his: Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem where the problem of space travel had already been resolved and the questions that we must ask now is grander in scale. Quantum mechanics and resolving an incalculable equation is at the heart of the scientific exploration.
But we must remember that Jules Verne was a novelist first and foremost, and scientist after. Though he was tasked with a tremendous task of backing his fiction with plausible science, he employed the same tricks of an illusionist to confuse the reader with much information that may be a little too much to digest. It is the classic trick of misdirection, and as an average reader with an all too average intelligence, I would not have picked up much on his calculations. Who would? We can only take for granted that in the outcome of the story, the conjecture is indeed possible.
Yet, we cannot underestimate Verne’s effort on getting things right as an author. His calculations are eerily accurate to the calculations of modern day science, and the fact that men really landed on the moon a century later only proves that the science fiction of today can indeed be the headline of tomorrow. There were uncanny similarities between what took place in the two books and what happened in the first moon mission.
Verne had also studied the surface of the moon to give us an accurate landscape of the vistas of the moon as seen by the three men orbiting it. Plus, Verne’s proposed site launching site in Florida is quite close to NASA’s Cape Canaveral. When the launch happened a hundred years later, it attracted a similar number of crowd of 300,000 odd people as in the novel. Is this the case of fact imitating fiction, or a mere coincidence?
However, there are principal differences between the two books. Whereas From the Earth to the Moon deals with the science of the launch, Around the Moon deals more with astronomy and thus surprisingly, was more complex of the two. It even mentions the incalculability of the three body problem. They are two entirely different books, each with its own flavour. The former is an ode to man’s determination to go beyond the confines of nature and to master it; the latter is nature’s reminder that hubris can only go so far. The three men never managed to land on the moon and it was only by sheer luck that they managed to escape a worse fate than starvation in their aluminium can.
From the Earth to the Moon is an exercise in project management, but any project managers would know how fictional the story is as: the project ran on time, somewhat within scope and had little blockers and surprises. Aside from a couple of tussles with opposing non-stakeholders such as Nicholls, there weren’t really much of a blocker and the launch was delivered to the second. In a dream world, all projects, especially ones of this scale would run on time and under budget.
I think at this time, From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon can be seen as a relic of literature, but still a relevant and and important piece of history. It is the stepping stone to the evolution of science fiction and much of the techniques Verne had used in these novels are used by sci-fi legends in the decades ahead, such as Clarke, Asimov and Liu. But perhaps this is why it is important to read books from this bygone era: it shows us where we’ve been and our ambitions then, to juxtapose it to where we stand now. And perhaps it will also indicate to us where we’re going to go from where we are now.
