Trip around the moon

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Binding of the first German-language edition of Die Reise um den Mond , published in 1873 by the Légrady Brothers, Budapest.
The projectile near the moon, drawing by Émile-Antoine Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville
The rescue of the moon travelers by the crew of the Susquehanna

Journey around the moon is a novel by the French author Jules Verne . The novel was first published in 1870 under the French title Autour de la Lune by the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel . It is the continuation of the work From the Earth to the Moon ( De la Terre à la Lune ) published in 1865 . The first German-language edition was published by the Légrády brothers in Pest in 1873 under the title Reise um den Mond .

It is an early work of the science fiction genre that anticipates the moon voyage by almost exactly one hundred years. However, Verne's moon travelers do not use a rocket, but a cannon, and they do not land on the moon.

action

Barbicane, the president of the Cannon Club of Baltimore , is with his traveling companions Nicholl and Ardan in the projectile in the huge Columbiade , a cannon of enormous firepower with which they and two dogs are to be shot from earth towards the moon. The three astronauts survive the launch. Shortly afterwards they encounter another small satellite on earth . They puzzle why they didn't hear the sound of the launch on takeoff and conclude that the sound could not overtake them because they were moving at supersonic speed immediately after takeoff . One of the two dogs is seriously injured from the start and eventually dies. The astronauts throw it out of their space capsule through a hatch and later discover that the dog's carcass is following them with the same course and speed.

They think about how to arrange themselves there after landing on the moon and communicate with the inhabitants of the moon. The travelers get into a state of intoxication during the flight. The cause is oversaturation of the air in the capsule with oxygen due to a valve that is opened too far. In the vicinity of the moon they experience total weightlessness . They eventually discover that their course will miss the moon. The cause is probably the deflection of the projectile when it encounters the second small satellite on earth. You enter the orbit of the moon.

Fortunately, their trajectory is an ellipse around the earth and not a hyperbola, and after a flight around the poles of the moon it finally leads them back to their home planet. On the way, they narrowly avoid colliding with an asteroid. Eventually they crash into the Pacific Ocean with their projectile . The flight was observed by the secretary of the Gun Club, the math genius James T. Maston, with a telescope on Longs Peak in the Rocky Mountains in the US state of Colorado . The space travelers are eventually rescued by the crew of the research vessel Susquehanna , a corvette of the United States Navy. After their rescue, the three men are celebrated as heroes on earth.

background

Even more so than in From Earth to the Moon , the teaching passages are the focus of this rather poor-story novel. The details of the origin of the moon, the topography of the moon, the naming of the lunar seas and mountains, and the history of astronomical observation of the moon, which were known at the time of its creation , are presented in great detail . The author makes several references to the moon maps by the German astronomers Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler .

Factory history

Autour de la Lune was preprinted from November 4 to December 8, 1869 in the feature section of the Journal des Débats . The book was published on January 13, 1870 under the title Autour de la Lune. Seconde partie de: De la Terre à la Lune published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel . An illustrated edition followed on September 16, 1872 with 44 engravings by Henri Theophile Hildibrand based on drawings by Emile Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville .

German editions (selection)

  • Trip around the moon. Translated by Ute Haffmans. Diogenes, Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-257-20243-1 .
  • Trip around the moon. Translated by Martin Schoske. Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-596-13372-6 .

literature

  • Heinrich Pleticha (ed.): Jules Verne manual . Deutscher Bücherbund / Bertelsmann, Stuttgart / Munich 1992.
  • Volker Dehs , Ralf Junkerjürgen: Jules Verne . Voices and interpretations of his work. Fantastic Library Wetzlar, Wetzlar 2005.
  • Volker Dehs: Jules Verne . Jules Verne. A critical biography. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2005. ISBN 3-538-07208-6

Web links

Commons : Journey around the moon  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Autour de la Lune  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roland Innerhofer: German Science-fiction 1870-1914 . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1996, p. 35, ISBN 3-205-98514-1 .
  2. ↑ Journal des Débats of November 4, 1869
  3. ↑ entry. In: The Complete Jules Verne Bibliography ; Retrieved June 2, 2010