Recommendations
Books Like De la Terre à la Lune by Jules Verne
Books for readers who love the first Moon voyage and the comedy of engineers pursuing the impossible
De la Terre à la Lune (1865) sent the first fictional humans to the Moon with a giant cannon — part scientific lecture, part comedy of obsessives, part founding text of space fiction. These 8 books share its comic enthusiasts, its technical precision, and its sense that human ingenuity can aim at anything.
- 1
Buy on AmazonAutour de la Lune
by Jules Verne
The direct sequel — the projectile circles the Moon and the three passengers return safely to Earth; the complete Moon voyage requires both novels
- 2
Buy on AmazonVingt mille lieues sous les mers
by Jules Verne
The companion Voyages extraordinaire — Captain Nemo's submarine as the ocean equivalent of the Columbiad's Moon; both use technical precision to take the reader somewhere no one has been
- 3Buy on Amazon
The First Men in the Moon
by H.G. Wells
Wells's Moon voyage — the direct response to Verne; where Verne's projectile finds a cold empty surface, Wells's travelers find the Selenites, an entire underground civilization; the scientific romance answer to the Voyages extraordinaires
- 4Buy on Amazon
The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
The answer to Verne's Earth-to-Moon direction — what if the planets sent to us instead; Martian cylinders landing in Surrey as the inverse of the Columbiad shell going out
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe's account of the Mercury astronauts — the American space program as the actual realization of Barbicane's Gun Club dream; the same mixture of technical obsession and comic egotism that Verne satirizes in the Gun Club
- 6Buy on Amazon
Le Voyage dans la Lune (film)
by Georges Méliès
The 1902 film directly based on Verne and Wells — Méliès's rocket in the Moon's eye is the most famous image in early cinema, and it was Verne's novel that put it there
- 7
Buy on AmazonL'Île mystérieuse
by Jules Verne
The most complete single Verne novel — five castaways building a civilization; where De la Terre à la Lune is about the reach toward the unknown, L'Île mystérieuse is about what humans build when they get there
- 8
Buy on AmazonVoyage au centre de la Terre
by Jules Verne
The companion Verne exploration of another impossible space — the Earth's interior as the Moon's underside; Professor Lidenbrock's manic certainty and Barbicane's are the same quality of Vernian obsessive
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