Where It's More Science than Fiction

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is not a very good book. In fact, I would argue it's not really a novel.

Not because it's short. It is a little short, but it's longer than many pulp novels.

It's that it doesn't contain many of the attributes of a novel. The characters are almost dispensed with for about half of the book--we are instead given calculations and science as if it's textbook.

[skim or skip, by all means]:

But, in order that the moon should reach the zenith of a given place, it is necessary that the place should not exceed in latitude the declination of the luminary; in other words, it must be comprised within the degrees 0º and 28° of lat. N. or S. In every other spot the fire must necessarily be oblique, which would seriously militate against the success of the experiment.

As to the sixth question, "What place will the moon occupy in the heavens at the moment of the projectile's departure?"
Answer.— At the moment when the projectile shall be discharged into space, the moon, which travels daily forward 13° 10' 35", will be distant from the zenith point by four times that quantity, i.e. by 52° 41' 20", a space which corresponds to the path which she will describe during the entire journey of the projectile. But, inasmuch as it is equally necessary to take into account the deviation which the rotary motion of the earth will impart to the shot, and as the shot cannot reach the moon until after a deviation equal to 16 radii of the earth, which, calculated upon the moon's orbit, are equal to...

There are pages and pages like this, describing the motion of the moon, the stresses put on the cannon, the type of gunpowder needed to create a certain kind of explosion, the kind of explosion necessary to move an object of a particular size, the size necessary to make it big enough to see it with a telescope, and the kind of telescope that would needed to do the job... and so on. The text fetishizes numbers and calculations, reveling in them, as if inundating the reader with math and jargon would make us forget how foolish it all is. That's fine. But he forgot a plot. Really, the plot is just planning it and building it and firing it, and much of that happens in a remote way, by unseen hands, and there's virtually no tension or interest anywhere.

The characters are rudimentary and given almost nothing to do except narrate like professors. (There's a tiny bit of personal conflict between the MC and his rival, but that fizzles.) The story reads more like a documentary, or maybe an HGTV renovation show, where it just shows how a job gets done. Except those shows have more humanity in them than this book.

The conflict--"we must build a giant cannon to shoot something to the moon"--is a legitimate conflict, potentially, but it's not given to humans to solve; it's given to physics. The only real obstacle was solving for x. There was a tiny bit of fundraising, but it also amounted to nothing.

Really, this book is what you get when a documentary and a physics textbook love each other very, very much.

And no conclusion, really. The cannon is shot, so you can claim it as a sort of climax, but we know nothing of the three men inside the projectile. Do they survive the initial firing? Does their science work well enough to provide air while they're in there? Do they fight? Are they scared? If he had told the story from their perspective, it would be a lot closer to a novel. Instead, like the crowd gathered to watch the projectile launched into space, we see it fired from the cannon and then... we just wander off, none too sure what, if anything, has been accomplished.

This could have been a very cool short story, and still could be, if we chopped about 80% of it.

Anyway, I didn't hate it, despite my rant. It was interesting as an example of the origins of science fiction. He was aiming for hard science, like Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke, Liu Cixin or Andy Weir, and it needed to start somewhere. It reminded me of Robinson Crusoe, the way that book also focused on specific, tiny, scientific details--building a home with poor tools, husbanding crops, solving all the problems of survival alone on a desert island--and the through-line from Robinson Crusoe to this to The Martian is pretty clear. I found it worth reading even if just for those insights.

Not much recommended. But who knows? You might like it.

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