De la Terre à la Lune Reading Order

De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865) by Jules Verne is the founding text of the Moon voyage in modern fiction and one of the most technically exact imaginative works of the nineteenth century. The novel follows the Gun Club of Baltimore — a society of former Civil War artillerists now bored by peacetime — who decide to solve the problem of their obsolescence by firing a giant projectile at the Moon. Verne worked out the mathematics of the Columbiad cannon and the trajectory of the shell with a precision that anticipated many features of the actual Apollo program: the launch site in Florida, the capsule, the splashdown in the ocean, the multiple-day journey. The novel is a comedy as much as a scientific adventure — Barbicane the president of the Gun Club, Nicholl the rival who bet he could build an impenetrable armor plate, and the Frenchman Michel Ardan (based on the photographer Nadar) who insists on riding in the projectile, are a brilliant comic trio. The sequel, Autour de la Lune (1870), follows the projectile around the Moon and returns the three to Earth. Together the two novels constitute the complete Moon voyage, and they were the direct inspiration for the Georges Méliès film Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902).